Author's Reply: “Bacterial infections predispose to the development of portal vein thrombosis in patients with decompensated cirrhosis”

We read with great interest the letter, by Zanetto and colleagues [ 1 ], which has validated and expanded upon our recent results [ 2 ] concerning the association between bacterial infections and portal vein thrombosis (PVT) development in cirrhotic patients. They enrolled 128 patients, followed-up for up to one year. As reported, 14% developed PVT, and, as in our study, bacterial infections were more common in patients who developed PVT (56% vs 24%, p = 0.005), and were an independent risk factor for PVT occurrence in two models of multivariate analysis (Model 1: HR 2.99, p = 0.02; Model 2: HR 3.60, p = 0.007).