Minimally invasive closure of bronchopleural fistulas.

We would like to congratulate Fruchter et al 1 for their ingenious, effective, and minimally invasive way of treating the very challenging condition of bronchopleural fi stulas as reported in a recent issue of CHEST (March 2011). However, because we were cited in their work, we must make a correction. The misunderstanding is that our fi rst publication was a case report of our fi rst patient (53-year-old man with a right upper lobectomy) using this method. 2 Later, Scordamaglio et al 3 published a review of our experience endoscopically treating airway fi stulas (two bronchopleural and one tracheoesophageal), which included this same patient. Since then, fi ve more fi stulas in four other patients have been treated, making a total of seven fi stulas treated in six patients (one patient with two fi stulas), with fi ve of them already closed. Although the technique used is similar to that in Fruchter et al, 1