LETTER TO THE EDITOR Letter to the Editor: Laparoscopic Versus Open Complete Mesocolon Excision in Right Colon Cancer: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis Shahin Hajibandeh 1 • Shahab Hajibandeh 2 • Rajeev Peravali 1 Ó Socie ´te ´ Internationale de Chirurgie 2020 Dear Editor, We read with great interest the well-conducted meta- analysis by Chaouch et al. [1] evaluating the comparative evidence of laparoscopic and open complete mesocolon excision (CME) in patients with right-sided colon cancer. The authors concluded that the open approach was associated with significantly lower rate of chyle leak based on the forest plot presented in their Fig. 3C. However, there are two important errors in the aforementioned forest plot which have erroneously changed the direction of pooled effect size in favour of the open group and provided false negative degree of heterogeneity. In the analysis of chyle leak, the number of events in the open and laparo- scopic groups regarding the studies of Bae et al. [2] and Kim et al. [3] is incorrect and other way around. In fact, the number of chyle leak in the open and laparoscopic groups in the study of Bae et al. [2] should be 12 and 3, respec- tively. Similarly, the number of chyle leak in the study of Kim et al. [3] should be 5 and 3, respectively. We have re-conducted the analysis using the corrected figures which demonstrated that there was no significant difference in chyle leak between two groups (OR: 1.82, 95% CI 0.65–5.08, p = 0.25). Moreover, the repeated analysis increased the degree of heterogeneity (I 2 ) from 0 to 22% (Fig. 1). In conclusion, unlike what Chaouch et al. [1] concluded, the corrected analysis of best available evidence (level 2b) does not show any superiority of open CME in chyle leak over the laparoscopic approach in patients with right-sided colon cancer. We believe this corrected result should be Fig. 1 The corrected forest plot of comparison of chyle leak & Shahin Hajibandeh shahin_hajibandeh@yahoo.com 1 Department of General Surgery, Sandwell and West Birmingham Hospitals NHS Trust, Birmingham, UK 2 Department of General Surgery, Glan Clwyd Hospital, Rhyl, Denbighshire, UK 123 World J Surg https://doi.org/10.1007/s00268-019-05346-8