Letter by Bouchard et al regarding article "Aprotinin does not increase the risk of renal failure in cardiac surgery patients".

To the Editor: Two recent publications have given rise to concerns regarding the safety of intraoperative aprotinin on renal function after cardiac surgery.1,2 Contrary to these studies, Furnary et al3 demonstrated that aprotinin does not increase the risk of acute renal failure (ARF) independently of the number of transfusions administered. We have 3 concerns regarding the findings of these studies that impair an adequate comparison of their results. First, all 3 studies used different definitions for ARF. Furnary et al3 selected the new requirement of dialysis as the ARF outcome, presumably because the risk predictive score has been validated for ARF requiring dialysis …