To the Editor.—In the article "Gastrointestinal Complication After Cardiac Surgery,"1 Welling et al provide an interesting discussion of their topic. Their low rate of gastrointestinal complication (1%), combined with the rarity of cardiac surgery in the general population, makes their study's lack of a control group quite reasonable.
It was not clear, however, why Welling et al excluded from their study a patient with multiple abdominal complications. This patient subsequently died, and her inclusion would have raised their mortality by 50%. It is also curious that, though Welling et al propose an ischemic cause, they report on pathologic examination of biopsy specimens in only three patients.