C-Reactive protein and electron beam computed tomography: a perfect match?

to refer to them as they represent different patient populations to our own. However, we agree that, as we did not present data on the diurnal variation in soluble P-selectin and soluble thrombomodulin in healthy subjects, we were perhaps premature to interpret this data in terms of “loss” of a pattern in the patients with AF, although this lack of diurnal variation is in keeping with our hypothesis of a “constant” hypercoagulable state in AF. Naturally, there are many confounders to be addressed in studies of thrombosis and hemostasis, and ours is typical in that atherosclerosis and its risk factors were present in some of our patients with AF. It has previously been shown that the hypercoagulable state in AF is independent of underlying etiology or associated heart disease (9), and we would emphasize that the main objective of our study was to assess the circadian or diurnal variation in the hypercoagulable state in AF, rather than to reproduce many previous analyses (including our own) of the effects of heart disease on hypercoagulability in AF. Indeed, we were unable to find any difference in our research indices comparing those patients with lone AF with those whose AF was confounded by other disease (1). Despite this, our cohort of patients are indeed characteristic of those presenting to the hospital with AF, and so the data are truly representative of a “real-life” situation.