LAUSR

We read the article ‘‘Endoscopic resection versus radical gastrectomy for early gastric cancer in Asia: A meta-analysis’’ with great interest [1]. Ning et al., using meta-analysis on non-randomized clinical interventional studies, found endoscopic resection (ER) to be a good treatment choice for patients with small and early gastric cancer (EGC) lesions (≤2 cm) without lymph node metastasis; and radical gastrectomy (RG) when the diameter of the tumor is large (> 2 cm) and preoperative examination suggests lymph node metastasis. We congratulate and applaud the authors on their interesting and important work on this topic. It is our belief that although this assessment scale can be used to assess the quality of observational studies such as case-control or cohort studies [2], other more effective methodological tools should be used for non-randomized interventional studies. These more effective tools include the methods summarized by Deeks et al. in their article [3], those included in the Methodological Index for Non-Randomized Studies [4] and those reported by Reisch et al. [5] The quality of the metaanalysis reported by Ning et al. would improve if the authors were to use a more suitable quality assessment scale.