The Color of Ruptures

To the Editor:Elijovich et al1 described the predictors of intraprocedural rupture (IPR) in patients treated for ruptured intracranial aneurysms. Their findings could have been helpful in identifying groups of patients at higher risk for IPR. However, several problems have not been sufficiently emphasized, raising the question whether some of their findings should be part of reported conclusions: 1. The study is retrospective and the statistical findings post hoc. There is no rationale for many of the factors studied as a predictor for IPR, other than the convenience that they were in the databank.2. The difficulty of retrospective databases is definition of variables and missing data. What criteria were used to qualify a patient as hypertensive or hyperlipidemic? It is likely that not every patient …