Reply by the Authors of the Original Article

Abstract

We read the comment and the related article of Yucel et al. 1 They studied an experimental blunt chest trauma model and claimed that the weight and height used in our experimental model was too much for rats. In our study, we conducted an experimental study to evaluate the effect of dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) and dexamethasone to lung injury occurred secondary to blunt chest trauma in rat model. Therefore, we had to use a previously proven experimental model. We used modified version of the model of Raghavendran et al. 2 Raghavendran used 0.3 kg weight from different height to get different impact energies in between 1.80 and 2.70 J (E ¼ m  G  h). They reported that the impact energy should not exceed 2.45 J to prevent fatal complications. However, they performed the experiments on a platform with a cardioprotective sheet to have bilateral contusion. Because we aimed to get unilateral contusion model, we dropped the weight on the right hemithorax to prevent cardiac complications. We dropped 0.5 kg weight from 40 cm height to get 1.96-J impact energy (E ¼ 0.5  9.8  0.4 ¼ 1.96 J), which was reported as the most appropriate energy to get lung injury with lower mortality by Ozel et al. 3 We have already had a control group in our study. We did not perform chest trauma in control group animals and compared the trauma group (Sham) with that control group. Macroscopic and histopathological findings revealed significant difference in SG compared with CG revealing that our