Reply

We thank Dr Balta and colleagues for their insightful comments. We agree with their letter and we remark on the importance of stiffness and endothelium parameters assessed by new and simple methods to evaluate the effectiveness of a drug. Arterial hypertension is related to increased arterial stiffness and mortality rates, and we noted that aliskiren exerted a beneficial effect on values of arterial and endothelial function. However, the small size of our study is a limitation. For this reason we agree with Dr Balta that future studies are needed.