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(Hypertension. 2008;51:e61.)
© 2008 American Heart Association, Inc.

Letters to the Editor

Response to Modeled Decomposition of Aortic Pressure Waveforms Does Not Provide Estimates for Pulse Wave Velocity

Australian School of Advanced Medicine, Macquarie University, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

We thank Hermeling et al¹ for their interest in our recent study on the use of a single pressure pulse wave for the estimation of aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV).² The main aim of the study was to propose a noninvasive and also a nonintrusive means of measuring aortic PWV. Aortic PWV is conventionally estimated from transit time (TT) between the carotid and femoral arteries, and this requires exposure of the groin. In addition, in many subjects with excessive adiposity in the groin area, it is difficult to obtain reliable femoral pulses. We agree that any noninvasive method has a certain number of assumptions and compromises, but we believe that we have obtained acceptable agreement between aortic PWV estimated from the single pulse method and aortic PWV measured directly using noninvasive external tonometric sensors. This warrants consideration of the methodology for situations where the femoral pulse cannot be obtained for whatever reason. It also offers the possibility of estimation of aortic PWV in retrospective analysis of large databases where central aortic pressure has been estimated from the tonometric radial pulse but with no direct measurements of PWV.

The methodology was based on the triangulation concept of the aortic flow wave published previously.^3,4 We would like to clarify some of the observations made by Hermeling et al¹ regarding the waveform decomposition and associated procedures. The methodology described in the study relates to the TT estimated from the maximum lag of cross-correlation of the decomposed forward and backward waves. The correlation of . . . [Full Text of this Article]