Skip to main content
  • Letter to the Editor
  • Open access
  • Published:

Regarding Iannicelli et al.

A Letter to this article was published on 28 March 2021

The Original Article was published on 30 December 2019

Dear Professor Corsello,

We read with interest the Review published by Iannicelli and colleagues [1] which reviewed our publication [2].

We write to clarify one point. The Review states that “the sample size analyzed was not numerically sufficient in the statistical analysis”. We respectfully differ on this conclusion.

We performed two studies (n = 123 and n = 131 respectively), both of which exceeded the a priori power calculation required of 114 patients per clinical setting. Indeed, pointed out in Table 1 of Iannicelli et al., our study sample size is by far the largest in the literature. This is reflected in statistically significant findings in the primary endpoint of change from baseline pain (with P = 0.018 and P = 0.034 respectively).

It is unclear how Iannicelli and colleagues came to regard the sample size as insufficient when our study is the largest in the literature, met a priori study recruitment goals, and formal statistical tests confirm significance.

Yours sincerely

Dr. Evelyn Chan and Dr. Paul Leong on behalf of the authors

Availability of data and materials

Not applicable.

References

  1. Iannicelli AM, Vito D, Dodaro CA, De Matteo P, Nocerino R, Sepe A, et al. Does virtual reality reduce pain in pediatric patients? A systematic review. Ital J Pediatr. 2019;45(1):171. https://doi.org/10.1186/s13052-019-0757-0.

    Article  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  2. Chan E, Hovenden M, Ramage E, Ling N, Pham JH, Rahim A, Lam C, Liu L, Foster S, Sambell R, Jeyachanthiran K, Crock C, Stock A, Hopper SM, Cohen S, Davidson A, Plummer K, Mills E, Craig SS, Deng G, Leong P. Virtual reality for pediatric needle procedural pain: two randomized clinical trials. J Pediatr. 2019;209:160–167.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2019.02.034.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgements

nil

Funding

nil

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Contributions

Both authors fulfil ICMJE criteria for authorship and read/approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paul Leong.

Ethics declarations

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Competing interests

Author of paper referred to in Review.

Additional information

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Chan, E., Leong, P. Regarding Iannicelli et al.. Ital J Pediatr 47, 78 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13052-021-01009-4

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s13052-021-01009-4