Letters about Published Papers

摘要

While grateful to Professor Al-Qattan for his scholarship on dorsal dimelia (DD), we believe that his data do not support his theory that isolated DD, i.e. DD without a concurrent anomaly (CA) is rare and that DD occurs during other events leading to the occurrence of the other congenital anomalies of the extremity.We base this on both the current article and an earlier one (Al-Qattan, 2013; Al-Qattan and Kfoury, 2011 ). Table 3 of the current article noted 11 patients with 'Dorsal dimelia and concurrent congenital anomalies in all previously reported cases in the literature' (giving a total of 16 cases including the five cases newly reported in this article). Although the current article states that: 'All previous authors have described isolated case reports', one of us (MFF) reviewed all the articles cited in Table 1 of the 2011 article and found that seven articles reported on a total of 12 patients having isolated DD (Table 1).