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摘要

We greatly appreciate the interest of Dr. Reek-ers in our recently published study, which is the first one to record and document the actual incidence of macro- and microembolizationduring revascularization procedures of infra-aortic arterial occlusive disease. Although Dr. Reekers expressed some quite interesting views worth discussing further, he slightly misunderstood the overall reported data. As it is explicitly stated in the text and the accompanying tables of the study, filter-protected revascularization was performed in 48 patients by applying 50 filter baskets in total (2 cases necessitated insertion of a second filter due to large thromboemboli). Regarding the captured debris, we reported that macro-scopically visible particles were evident in 94.0% (47/50) of the filters after retrieval. Moreover, particles with a major axis >1 and >3 mm were detected in 58.0% (29/50) and 12.0% (6/50) of the examined baskets, respectively. Thus, one might speculate that the estimated rate of prevented distalembolism was more than double the reported rate in the literature. Arguably, the statistical analysis mainly incriminated declotting procedures for this finding, which is in accordance with worldwide clinical experience.