To the Editor—We thank Drs Yamamoto and Ishimura for their interest in our work and for pointing out an important aspect of it. Many studies on risk stratification regarding infective endocarditis (IE) in bacteremia divide patients into IE-cases and non-IE cases, whereas we chose to acknowledge that excluding IE is difficult [1–3]. Refuting IE in a given patient demands careful investigations with trans-esophageal echocardiography (TEE) and computerized tomography as a minimum and these types of investigations had not been performed in the majority of patients in our retrospective cohorts. Therefore, we created the “unknown group,” which consists of patients who did neither meet the Dukes criteria nor the criteria for non-IE [4].

中文翻译：

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回复山本和西村

感谢编辑-感谢Yamamoto博士和Ishimura博士对我们的工作感兴趣，并指出了工作的重要方面。关于菌血症中感染性心内膜炎（IE）的风险分层的许多研究将患者分为IE病例和非IE病例，而我们选择承认很难排除IE [1-3]。拒绝在特定患者中使用IE至少需要使用经食管超声心动图（TEE）和计算机断层扫描进行仔细的研究，而在我们的回顾性队列研究中，大多数患者并未进行过这类检查。因此，我们创建了一个“未知群体”，该群体由既不符合Dukes标准也不符合非IE标准的患者组成[4]。