Dear Editors,

We thank the authors for their interest and their Letter to the Editors regarding our Journal article.

As is stated clearly on the first page of our article, the study was sent on 19 June 2008 and was accepted for publication on 3 March 2009. The article by Bridgman et al. [1] was available online on 9 January 2009 and in printed form in June 2009. The last revision of our article was sent in January 2009, and in this revision, we merely replied to the questions raised by the reviewers. We could hardly be expected to have read Bridgman et al. article in such a short time, especially since it was available only online; in any case, in the process of revision an article, the authors respond to the reviewers’ questions and do not re-write their manuscript every time they re-submit it. The authors can be sure that if their paper had been published earlier, we would definitely have referred to it.

With regard to the authors’ comment referring to the number of patients includeds, they are right. There was an error in the original text: The correct data are the ones shown in Table 1 (Comparative table of the global results obtained for each group). The four patients excluded correspond to the Subvastus group, and the final numbers were 52 in Subvastus and 48 in Parapatelar.

Our study aimed mainly to measure differences with regard to the force of extension of the knee using dynamometry, not so much in specific scores or quality of life (HQRL). We used these scores in previous work [2, 3].