Extract
We read the letter of our colleague, Dr. Frölke, with great interest.
First, on the basis of our study, we believe that vitamin C does prevent
complex regional pain syndrome. Unfortunately, most of Dr. Frölke's
comments do not apply to our study.The number of enrolled patients in our study in relation to the number of
eligible patients was mentioned in the Discussion of our article. The quality
of reduction was studied in this paper and in our paper in
Lancet1
as well. In both studies, there was no relationship between the occurrence of
complex regional pain syndrome and the need to undergo fracture reduction.
Moreover, the quality of reduction did not influence the chance of complex
regional pain syndrome developing. We performed the current study because, to
our knowledge, there have been no published studies since
19991 that either
confirm or refute our original findings.