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Abstract

Thank you for your editorial comment. 1 Belew D.R. Wilson S.N. DiCarlo V.D. Terris M.K Patient-centered treatment decisions for urethral stricture: conjoint analysis improves surgical decision-making [Editorial Comment]. Urology. 2016; PubMed Google Scholar We believe that choice-based conjoint analysis provides a valuable decision-making tool not only for urethral stricture patients, but also for urology patients facing any treatment decision. Admittedly, our choice-based survey did not include all of the treatment attributes that are important to patients with urethral stricture disease, and this is partly a limitation of the conjoint technique itself. To understand how participants rank the importance of attributes against each other, it is important to limit the number of attributes being studied. We endeavored to include no more than six attributes, and these were determined through qualitative interviews and pretesting with patients who had existing urethral stricture disease. Although the variables included as attributes do not represent a comprehensive list, we do believe that they are some of the most important to patients based on these interviews.