Response to Letter to the Editor from Ackerman MJ, et al.

We appreciate the opportunity to respond to the letter by Ackerman et al. [1], andwe greatly appreciate the effort of the authors of the letter to communicate their concerns to us. We attempt to address these concerns below. Please note that Ms. Laura Crandall has recused herself from this response due to a conflict of interest as a member of the SUDC Foundation, since the letter writers represent the board of the foundation. 1. The major concerns raised in the letter are that the design of the study was not population-based, the cases were accrued retrospectively, and there was inconsistency across medical examiners on the information available to us for review. We have organized our response to address these major and related concerns together first. In the response, we summarize the critique of the authors in italics and then reiterate (in quotation marks) and clarify the text of our original paper in which the points questioned were addressed.