Letter to the editor

摘要

We are pleased to realize that our recently published article "ALDH1A1 is a marker of astrocytic differentiation during brain development and correlates with better survival in glioblastoma patients" by Adam et al (1) meets a broad interest of your readership. We thank you for forwarding the letter by Dr. Schlegel that reached you with respect to our work, and it is a pleasure for us to respond to this letter as follows. Dr. Schlegel noticed that the previously published work by Campos and colleagues (2) as well as his own work is in contrast to our findings, namely that the expression of ALDH1A1 correlates with a better survival in glioblastoma patients. We have extensively discussed possible reasons for the discrepancy between the work by Campos et al and our own work in the published manuscript (1) and we would love to further discuss our findings in relation to the work by Dr. Schlegel. His group reported on 24 glioblastoma samples that were stained with antibodies against ALDH1A1 and showed "various degrees of ALDH1 expression" (4). Whereas the cohort has obviously been extended to a number of 74 samples in the meantime, further details on technical issues, expression values, clinical data as well as statistical calculations have unfortunately not been provided, preventing us from carefully studying his findings.