Reply to Safer, Tasci, Cintosun, and Binay Safer

摘要

We appreciate the letter by Dr. Safer and colleagues (2) and are pleased to respond. First, we would like to inform the readers that the volunteers in our study are the exact same subjects as described by Hastings et al. (1), participating in exactly the same study; therefore we did indeed stratify our groups by baseline fitness. Although we thought that we made this point clear in the manuscript, on careful re-read it appears that this fact was implicit rather than explicit. We regret this omission and appreciate the opportunity for clarification. Second, we are preparing another paper describing the effects of rowing ergometry on mineral metabolism in collaboration with our colleague Dr. Joe Zerwekh, which will include all the measurements and markers used in his previous studies of bed rest and bone metabolism and follow his previously published protocols (3) in the context of our study.