Reply to the letter regarding "Chronic mechanical irritation and oral squamous cell carcinoma: A systematic review and meta-analysis".

Dear Editor, We thank Dr. Jian Xie for the valuable inputs on our paper titled 'Chronic mechanical irritation and oral squamous cell carcinoma: A systematic review and meta-analysis [1].' The first concern of Dr. Xie was that we had included two studies that were based on the same population. We re-examined these papers, one was published in 2010 [2] and the other in 2017 [3] by the same group of authors. Given the significant time difference between the two papers, we did not want to presume they were from the same sample population. There is no clear evidence that they are from the same sample population. Read more in PDF.