Reply to the Comment on Association of FLT3-internal tandem duplication length with overall survival in acute myeloid leukemia: a systematic review and meta-analysis

We thank Tong and Schoones for their just and critical appraisal of our manuscript with regards to our search strategy.¹ We agree that our search strategy might have benefited from more exhaustive discussion and specification to facilitate reproducible research. Since the more elaborate search strategy proposed by Tong and Schoones identified more references in all databases, we sought to investigate whether we missed any additional relevant references and if these references could possibly affect our results. We detail below that under Tong and Schoones’ search strategy, our results remain unchanged.

We reviewed the additional 338 references from the PubMed search, which yielded no relevant articles. The same applied for the 55 (53 when limited from 1996 to 2021) additional references from the Cochrane Library (reviewing our data, we identified an error in the PRISMA diagram, which stated that 0 references were found in the Cochrane Library. However, our initial strategy identified 252 references from 1996 to 2021, of which no relevant references additional to the PubMed and Embase searches). Unfortunately, applying the proposed Embase and Web of Science searches yielded errors and did not return any results. We were unable to correct there errors. Therefore, we were unable to review additional references from these two databases. We contacted the authors to resolve this issue, and we would be happy to review the additionally found references to assure no relevant articles were missed with our initial search.

In conclusion, Tong and Schoones provide a more detailed, elaborate search strategy, identifying additional articles compared with our initial search. Reviewing these additional references did not yield any additional relevant articles for meta-analysis. Therefore, we conclude that the reported results in our manuscript remain unaffected.

Footnotes

• Received September 20, 2022
• Accepted September 26, 2022

Correspondence

D.G.J. CUCCHI - d.cucchi@amsterdamumc.nl

Disclosures

JJWMJ has received research funding from Novartis and BMS; and adboards from Novartis, Pfizer and Abbvie; is president of Apps for Care and Science Foundation. This foundation has received unrestricted educational grants from Abbvie, Alexion, Beigene, Astellas, EUSApharma, Novartis, Amgen, Sanofi Genzyme, Takeda, Jazz, Pfizer, Roche, Servier, Daiichi-Sankyo, Janssen, Incyte and BMS for development of the HematologyApp. DGJC has received speaker fees from Takeda and conference visit support from Servier. TBP works part-time for expanded access service provider myTomorrows, in which he holds stock and stock options (<0.1%). TBP is contractually free to publish, and the service provider is not involved in any of his past or ongoing research, nor this Letter.

Contributions

DGJC and TBP screened additional references for relevance. DGJC drafted the reply. TBP and JJWMJ revised the reply. All authors approved the final version.