This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Related article  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Surgical Interventions  • Hepatobiliary Surgery  • Alert me on articles by topic

	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: In response to Dr Livingston, we believe the NNT of 526 to avoid 1 case of CBDI is quite favorable compared with other safety interventions that have been incorporated into standard medical care (eg, standardization of instruments in machines used to deliver anesthetic gases) or into society in general (eg, mandatory use of seat belts). It is up to the community of surgeons, patients, and those who are paying for their care to determine if the use of a largely benign intervention in approximately 500 patients to prevent a life-threatening complication in a single patient is a reasonable trade-off. Furthermore, informal calculations of costs are susceptible to bias that cannot be fully assessed, and thus they tend to reflect the baseline assumptions of the calculations. More formalized cost analyses also make assumptions about cost and probability of events but allow for more systematic discussion and critique.

Our group . . . [Full Text of this Article]

RELATED ARTICLE

Intraoperative Cholangiography and Risk of Common Bile Duct Injury
Edward H. Livingston
JAMA. 2003;290(4):459.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT