1 Memorial Hospital, Pawtucket, Rhode Island 02860
We thank Dr. Graham for his interest in our paper and for his constructive criticisms. However, there may be a problem in semantics in regard to his first criticism, for what we did "compare" were premature newborns with or without respiratory distress syndrome of similar gestational ages (30 to 33 weeks and 34 to 37 weeks respectively). Dubowitz et al. claim a 95% confidence limit of two weeks utilizing their total scoring system, which we also used.