Prolonged Ventricular Repolarization in Hypertension: Is It Heart Rate?—Reply

We thank Funck-Brentano and Charbit for their comments on our study,1 in which we found that prolonged QTc is a risk factor for coronary events and cardiovascular mortality in uncomplicated hypertensive subjects. Given that the Bazett correction formula tends to overcorrect QT interval,1 Funck-Brentano and Charbit propose that heart rate, rather than QTc, might be associated with cardiovascular outcome in our study. This is an interesting and potentially important hypothesis. However, we had previously reported in the same population with a shorter follow-up that heart rate had no significant association with cardiovascular morbidity and mortality over the next few years.2 We rechecked this hypothesis in the present database by including heart rate as an additional explanatory variable for coronary events, and again we found that it did not predict coronary events (P =3D .36 in the Cox model).