Author ’ s response to reviews Title : Association between polymorphisms of TAS 2 R 16 and susceptibility to colorectal cancer

Double check the “background” section: there is an Italian word appearing. We carefully checked but we did not find any Italian word in the abstract. Results Revise the text since there are some type errors (see for instance the end of first paragraph on page 8 “..reported In supplementary..”) We have thoroughly revised all the manuscript. Discussion Please rephrase the first sentence of the section since it is not understandable “to further... that show the role of genes polymorphic variants taste receptor genes in...” We thank the editor for the comment and we have changed the sentence to be clearer. Table 1 Authors did not tested whether there were significant differences among cases and controls in the distribution of covariates presented in Table1 both overall or among cohorts. For the Italian Case-control group for example there is a quite large difference of age (almost 15 years) between cases and control. Similarly, the gender distribution in controls is not reflecting the real distribution of the cancer among gender.. As the editor knows very well it is extremely difficult in a retrospective study to match cases and controls for epidemiologic parameters especially in disease of the elderly such as cancer. However, we are aware of the potential bias that this can introduce and this is the reason why we systematically adjust all the analyses for age and gender.