Reply to: The potential confounding role of nutritional support.

On behalf of all co-authors, I sincerely thank Dr. Hong for his insightful comments regarding our article and discuss the po-tential role of nutritional support as a confounder in our study (1). First, we recognized the prognostic importance of nutritional and inflammatory status in our cohort, as evidenced by our inclusion of baseline albumin (ALB) and the C-reactive protein/albumin (CRP/ALB) ratio as covariates in our propensity score matching (PSM) and inverse probability of treatment weighting (IPTW) analyses. Both were identified as independent adverse prognostic factors in multivariate models. These markers were adjusted for in our models to account for baseline nutritional and inflammatory status. Moreover, our PSM and IPTW analyses successfully balanced the groups for key baseline nutritional markers, suggesting that the groups were comparable in terms of underlying nutritional risk at treatment initiation.