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(Hypertension. 2004;43:e2.)
© 2004 American Heart Association, Inc.

Hypertension Electronic Pages

Letters to the Editor

Response

Department of Medicine IV/Nephrology, University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany

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

We agree that measurement of forearm blood flow (FBF) is an excellent tool to study vascular pharmacology and physiology in humans and that the vascular effects of aldosterone are not easy to discern because of the complex reactions by different systems. Our main objective was to study interactions between the rapid effects of aldosterone and other vasoactive mediators. We did not use the measurement of FBF of the contralateral arm in this setting. We compared FBF during aldosterone infusion with FBF during placebo infusion, as shown in Figure 1 of our paper.¹ Therefore, the effects in the infused arm cannot be due to changes in the contralateral arm. We know that we cannot exclude systemic effects due to a possible spillover of the intra-arterially infused aldosterone by the placebo control, but such effects are not very likely, as neither blood pressure nor heart rate were affected (Table of our paper¹). As pointed out by Schmitt et al, the contralateral arm may be preferable as control in certain settings, but for our study design focusing on the interaction between vasoactive substances, we strongly feel that placebo was the appropriate control. In addition, the aldosterone preparation used in our study contained mixed micelles to keep aldosterone in solution, for which we could only control by using a placebo containing mixed micelles without aldosterone. We admit that performing both types of control would have been the optimal solution.

Schmitt et al refer to 2 other studies examining nongenomic aldosterone effects in the . . . [Full Text of this Article]