Reply to “Letter to the editor: Myogenic responses occur on a beat-to-beat basis in the resting human limb”

REPLY: We are excited that our study has garnered the attention of others and pleased to have the opportunity to respond and debate the merits of our findings. Dr. Nitzan’s letter (6) to the editor raises some interesting points regarding the interpreta-tion of our results and how it relates to his work and the work of Lossius et al. (5), which we would like to address. In our study (4), we first identified a negative relationship between mean arterial pressure (MAP) and forearm blood flow (BF), wherein transient MAP elevations were followed by a decrease rather than an increase in BF. This seemed to oppose our basic presumptions of hemodynamics in which pressure drives flow (Poiseuille’s law). Thus, to further examine this, we conducted additional protocols in the forearm (brachial artery) as well as in the lower leg (popliteal artery) and performed three independent analyses, which, together, furthe