• Online Features  This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Topic Collections  • Critical Care/ Intensive Care Medicine  • Adult Critical Care  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Surgery  • Surgical Physiology  • Surgical Physiology, Other  • Drug Therapy  • Adverse Effects  • Endocrine Diseases  • Endocrine Diseases, Other  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Bryan A. Cotton, MD; Oscar D. Guillamondegui, MD

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

In reply

We would like to thank Drs Mullins and Theodoro for their comments and interest in on our recent article.¹ There are several statements, however, that need to be addressed.

The authors question the internal validity of the study design. Internal validity errors concern instances in which a study design fails to address the narrowest of research questions. We feel the basic study question was answered and clearly stated in the introduction.

As to "obvious selection bias" of studying only those with suspected AI, we would agree and this was addressed in our study limitations. However, we were not evaluating cosyntropin unresponsiveness but rather the presence of clinically relevant AI that warranted intervention. In fact, cosyntropin unresponsiveness (in the absence of hemodynamic issues) has been shown not to correlate with outcome.² Therefore, it appears relevant that we selected those patients in . . . [Full Text of this Article]

AUTHOR INFORMATION


CiteULike    Connotea    Delicious    Digg    Facebook    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?