Response to “Editorial on pain following thoracic surgery”

We appreciate Holm et al.’s interest in our paper (1). By design, our study was not powered to answer each secondary result. This point was already acknowledged in the limitations section. The primary outcome variable of our study was the incidence of chronic pain, at 6 months, for any patient undergoing thoracic surgery. We tested the primary hypothesis of whether variables from preoperative evaluation can predict chronic pain after thoracic surgery. Based on our data from 99 patients who were followed for 6 months, the answer was no. Acute postsurgical pain was the only covariate associated with the presence of chronic pain.