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The authors’ reply

¹ University of Ottawa Heart Institute, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
² The Methodist DeBakey Heart Center, Houston, Texas, USA

Correspondence to:
Dr I G Burwash, University of Ottawa Heart Institute, 40 Ruskin Street, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada K1Y 4W7; iburwash@ottawaheart.ca

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

We thank Dr Linhartova for her comments on our article "Impact of blood pressure on the Doppler echocardiographic assessment of severity of aortic stenosis",¹ with which we are in agreement. Hypertension and aortic stenosis (AS) frequently coexist, as observed by Linhartova et al,² with a prevalence of 28–64% in prospective studies investigating therapies to retard AS progression.^3–6 We have demonstrated that a blood pressure change in an AS patient can affect the Doppler-echo indices of AS severity, largely due to the concomitant change in transvalvular flow.^{1 7 8} The clinical implications of our observations are important for AS patients with hypertension, or any patient undergoing serial evaluation of AS severity, in which a difference in haemodynamics between studies could potentially result in an apparent change in AS severity unrelated to disease progression. In this regard, we recommend recording blood pressure and transvalvular flow in all AS patients undergoing Doppler-echo examinations. In . . . [Full text of this article]