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  • Related letters  • Similar articles in JAMA  Topic Collections  • Renal Diseases  • Dialysis  • Renal Diseases, Other  • Statistics and Research Methods  • Alert me on articles by topic  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

	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 Drs Shin and Steinmann, we recognized the possibility that the association between altitude and mortality may be confounded by race. Unfortunately, mortality rate data available from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are not provided for all 4 races of interest. Thus, the comparison between the general and the ESRD populations was standardized only for age and sex. However, it is notable that in the general population black individuals experience greater mortality than white individuals, but in the ESRD population the opposite is true.¹ Given that relatively few black individuals live at high altitude, the difference between the age-, sex-, and race-standardized relative mortality rates in the general and ESRD populations could be larger than the difference between the age- and sex-standardized rates.

We agree that there are other potential confounders of the observed altitude-mortality association as well as other factors that may be . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Wolfgang C. Winkelmayer, MD, ScD, MPH
wwinkelmayer@partners.org

M. Alan Brookhart, PhD
Brigham and Women's Hospital
Boston, Massachusetts

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

RELATED ARTICLE

Altitude and All-Cause Mortality in Incident Dialysis Patients
Wolfgang C. Winkelmayer, Jun Liu, and M. Alan Brookhart
JAMA. 2009;301(5):508-512.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT  

RELATED LETTERS

Association Between Altitude and Mortality in Incident Dialysis Patients
Ji Young Shin and William C. Steinmann
JAMA. 2009;301(23):2442.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Association Between Altitude and Mortality in Incident Dialysis Patients
Robert Scragg, Ravi Thadhani, and Carlos A. Camargo, Jr
JAMA. 2009;301(23):2442-2443.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT  

Association Between Altitude and Mortality in Incident Dialysis Patients
Stanley Shaldon
JAMA. 2009;301(23):2443.
EXTRACT | FULL TEXT