The Statistical Analyses Of The Study "Sufentanil Sublingual Tablet System (SSTS) For The Management Of Postoperative Pain After Major Abdominal And Gynecological Surgery Within An ERAS Protocol: An Observational Study" [Response To Letter].

Dear editor

We thank Wang and Miao1 for their interest in our recent publication2 and the appreciation of our work.

We agree with them on the need of using repeated-measures analysis to evaluate pain intensity at different timepoints.

We acknowledge that, for the sake of brevity, our manuscript did not properly clarify the statistical methods used for the analysis and we take this opportunity to better explain them.

We performed a repeated measure analysis of variance (ANOVA) to compare pain intensity on different time points. The analysis resulted statistically significant (p<0.01). Afterwards, we performed multiple comparisons using the error deriving from the ANOVA for repeated measures, which turned out statistically significant (p<0.01).

In addition, we used the paired t-test to compare pain intensity on day 0 (baseline) and day 3, as indicated in the recent publication (median NRS 6 to 0, p<0.01).2