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Georgios Stamatis
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J Thorac Cardiovasc Surg 2009;137:255-256
© 2009 The American Association for Thoracic Surgery

Letter to the Editor

Reply to the Editor:

Alessandro Marra, MD, PhDa, Ludger Hillejan, MDb, Georgios Stamatis, MDa

a Department of Thoracic Surgery and Endoscopy, Ruhrlandklinik, Essen, Germany
b Department of Thoracic Surgery, Klinikum St Georg, Ostercappeln, Germany

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

We thank Drs Lim and Dusmet for their comments. We would like to answer some issues they addressed in the statistical analysis of our article.

As concerns the need to report specificity, competing methods for mediastinal restaging are of noninvasive (positron emission tomography, integrated positron emission tomography and computed tomography), or invasive (endoesophageal ultrasonography with fine-needle aspiration biopsy, endobronchial ultrasonography with transbronchial needle aspiration, remediastinoscopy) nature. Noninvasive methods do not provide histologic proof of their positive findings, so specificity varies to a high of 90% (and thus is lower than 100%). Invasive methods are able to provide a histologic or cytologic biopsy specimen of lymph nodes. In the first case, specificity is as high as 100%; in the second, however, cytologic examination may yield false-positive findings. In a review of the literature on cytologic study in pulmonary medicine, Policarpio-Nicolas and Wick1Go reported overall sensitivity and specificity values ranging from 60% to . . . [Full Text of this Article]






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