Reply to letter on published paper: improving quality of care in inflammatory bowel disease: what changes can be made today?

We thank Drs. Selinger, Leong and McLaughlin for their interest and insightful comments on our work. Their previous study on patients' understanding and preference on methods of conveying statistical information is truly a pioneering work on this topic in the area of inflammatory bowel disease. The study shows the preference of patients for relative risk reduction (RR) over optical illustrations such as Cates Plots (CP) or absolute risk (AR) when communicating the benefits of maintenance therapy for ulcerative colitis. In our view, the different modes of presentation of statistical data may be better suited for communicating events of different incidence rates. Whereas RR is the patients preferred and may be the most appropriate to communicate risks of events with relatively high incidence, such as the risk of relapse, AR may be more appropriate to communicate events with very low incidence, such as adverse events of drugs, and risk of dysplasia or cancer associated with IBD or its treatments. For example, communicating a 3-fold increase in the risk of pneumonia associated to anti-TNF treatment may be deterring for some patients to accept the therapy, whereas communication of an increase in risk from