TY - JOUR T1 - Authors’ response JF - Gut JO - Gut SP - 279 LP - 279 VL - 57 IS - 2 AU - Claudio De Felice AU - Mattia Gentile AU - Alessandro Barducci AU - Antonio Bellosi AU - Stefano Parrini AU - Giovanna Chitano AU - Giuseppe Latini Y1 - 2008/02/01 UR - http://gut.bmj.com/content/57/2/279.2.abstract N2 - We read with great interest the Letter to the Editor by Mauro Carrara, Renato Marchesini, Stefano Tomatis, Lucio Bertario and Paola Sala. First of all we greatly appreciate the effort made by the authors in validating our results.1 As already stated in our previous study, more extensive data are of course needed to understand the potential value of oral light reflectance as a clinical marker in colorectal cancer.The results of these authors apparently differ from our research findings. As pointed out below, we believe that the apparently different results could be mainly attributable to critical methodological differences between the two studies. In particular, the authors state that blood contains two important chromophores only—that is, oxyhaemoglobin and deoxyhaemoglobin, both of which have a negligible effect on … ER -