Reply to "CMV merits further evolutionary and biological view".

Abstract

We thank Ferhat Arslan for this letter. Biological significance is certainly the most important aspect in biomedical research; however, statistics provide a powerful tool to reveal associations between biological variables. In our study, we aimed to identify predictor variables for mortality in solid organ transplant recipients with carbapenemase-producing Enterobacteriaceae-bloodstream infections (CPE-BSI) regardless of their causal associations and to analyze the predictive capacity of the model. However, in this case, we consider there is a plausible clinical justification for the variables and interaction obtained in our model. Thus, for the interaction term, it could be interpreted that in high-risk patients, the mortality associated with CPE infection is so high that the impact of a previous cytomegalovirus (CMV) infection would not involve higher mortality.