Response to “A meta‐analysis comparing higher and lower dose radiotherapy for palliation in locally advanced lung cancer”

Abstract

D ear Editor,We have read the Letter to the Editor by Vlayen et al. carefully. We apologize for the wrongly extracted data in our meta-analysis. (1) The 1-year overall survival (OS) rate in the Dutch trial by Kramer et al. (2) was 19.6% for the high-dose group and 10.9% for the low-dose group. We have redone the statistical analysis. The below paragraph shows the corrected results and our conclusion was also revised as: "This meta-analysis indicates that high-dose (≥30 Gy) radiotherapy provides higher 1-year OS rate than low-dose (<30 Gy) radiotherapy in patients with locally advanced lung cancer; however, the symptom palliation and 2-year OS are similar between high-dose and low-dose radiotherapy."Overall survival rate. The forest plot of the meta-analysis for the 1-year OS rate is presented in Fig. 1. After pooling of the data, no significant heterogeneity among the studies was found (Q = 3.07, d.f. = 4, P = 0.547; I 2 = 0.0%); therefore, a fixedeffects model was used for the meta-analysis of the 1-year OS rate. The combined odd ratios (ORs) revealed significant difference in 1-year OS between patients treated with a higher radiotherapy dose compared to those treated with a lower dose. Among the five studies, ORs ranged from 1.04 to 1.99, with the combined OR = 1.28 (95% confidence interval, 1.03-1.60; P = 0.029; Fig. 1).