Letter to the Editor: Commentary on Spinal Surgery and Subsequent ESR and WBC Changes Pattern: A Single Center Prospective Study (Korean J Neurotrauma 2021;17:136–147)

Dear Editor,

Thank you for the opportunity to review the paper titled “Spinal Surgery and Subsequent ESR and WBC Changes Pattern: A Single Center Prospective Study.” Postoperative infection management is an important issue in spine surgery. Therefore, we believe that this paper will be helpful in assessing surgical site infections in actual clinical practice. However, the statistical method applied to the data presented by the authors and its interpretation are lacking. It is insufficient to simply determine the correlation between the factors and white blood cell (WBC) and erythrocyte sedimentation rate (ESR) values using Pearson correlation, which analyzes the correlation with one-to-one matching.¹⁾ In future studies, the authors need to perform a multivariate analysis to determine the complex relationship among several factors and correlation between WBC and ESR values.