Reply to J. Boix et al.

We thank Drs Boix and colleagues for the presentation of their results of emergency sclerotherapy. We concur with them that, with competent endoscopists (which is the likely situation in the randomized trials we evaluated with meta-analysis), sclerotherapy is an effective therapy, particularly if associated with vasoactive therapy for bleeding esophageal varices. Our data show that it is comparable to ligation and can be used as the endoscopic therapy of first choice. Their results confirm our interpretation of the data contained in the randomized trials.