Idiopathic vs Hereditary Pancreatitis
- F. Ulrich Weiss, PhD;
- Peter Simon, MD
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Division of Molecular Gastroenterology
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität
Münster, Germany
- Carsten Hohoff, PhD
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Department of Forensic Medicine
Universitätsklinikum Münster
Münster
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Department of Pediatrics
- Wolfram Domschke, MD;
- Markus M. Lerch, MD
-
Department of Medicine B
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität
Münster
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
In Reply: In response to Drs Keim and Teich, we suggest that publication or rejection of trials in top medical journals may be more related to quality than publication bias against negative studies.1 A number of published studies (21 to our knowledge) have reported alterations in established disease genes from various subgroups of patients with pancreatitis. Unfortunately, few investigators have applied the stringent criteria for idiopathic pancreatitis used in our study, and none have investigated the extended families of patients with seemingly sporadic trypsinogen mutations. Because this was the specific focus of our study, and because of the limit for references in our Research Letter, we restricted citations to the most relevant work for our report.
The suggestion by Keim and Teich that our results are due to inadequate history taking is unfounded since, in contrast with all prior studies, we obtained both clinical and genetic data from unaffected …
