Response to Dr. Levent Filik:

Thank you very much for your interest in our article. It is a reasonable opinion that dietary data in adolescence or midlife, before 40 years of age, should have been considered in our investigation of the association between the intake of vitamin A and the risk of developing gastric cancer, because the initiation of the cancer may have occurred several decades before its diagnosis. However, we have no records of the subjects’ dietary data before the initiation of the study, as is the case in most cohort studies. In addition, the dietary pattern in individuals, including their vitamin A intake, may be likely to remain unchanged over the long term.