Reply to “Letter to the editor: ‘Deconstructing the dogma of sympathetic restraint and its role in the cardiovascular response to exercise’”

REPLY: We thank Dr. Tschakovsky (3) for his interest and enthusiasm regarding our recent study (1) dealing with sym-pathetic control of blood flow in different tissues of the leg in humans at rest and during exercise. Dr. Tschakovsky impor-tantly emphasises that exercise-evoked vasodilation cannot directly spread from the active quadriceps muscle group to the inactive hamstring muscles. This was not what we literally meant, and although according to our understanding ascending vasodilatation and its spread to inactive tissues could be con-tributing to some marginal extent, his concern in this regard was apparently mainly raised from our integration of our findings with those of Moore and colleagues (2), together suggesting that -adrenergic-mediated sympathetic constraint is important for optimization of blood flow and oxygen extrac-tion to the most metabolically active tissues of the limb. W