To the Editor:
I read with great interest the paper on mortality and functionality after stroke in patients with systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), by Rossides, et al1, which fills important knowledge gaps in this domain.
However, I was surprised that the median age at stroke onset of the patients with SLE was 68 years for ischemic stroke and 65 for hemorrhagic stroke, while the mean time since SLE diagnosis was 2.5 years for ischemic stroke and 3.3 years for hemorrhagic stroke. This could have meant that the age at which SLE was diagnosed surpassed 60 years in this cohort, which is unusual for this disease.
Of course, it could have been a bit misleading that the time since SLE diagnosis is presented as mean, while it should have been summarized as median: when the SD is several times larger than the mean (15.5 for ischemic stroke and 17.6 for hemorrhagic stroke), the population is clearly not normally distributed, and median with interquartile range is more suitable.
REFERENCE
- 1.↵