We have read with great interest your comments on our article, and thank you for them.
As you say, our study centers on a special subpopulation within the wider population of patients who present out-of-hospital sudden death: namely, those alive when admitted to cardiac intensive care units. Although this could be considered a bias, as we acknowledge among the limitations of the study, we consider it of interest to contribute data on the clinical course and prognosis of these patients who represent a specific group of increasing importance in cardiac intensive care units.
Sadly, the encouraging prognostic data found in our group cannot be generalized to the population of patients with out-of-hospital sudden death, whose total survival rate is notably lower.1
We think any approach to studying out-of-hospital sudden death will help us to improve our understanding of the general problem and continue working to optimize the attention these patients receive. Hence, we await with great interest the publication of data from EPES (Empresa Pública de Emergencias Sanitarias, a public company belonging to the regional government of Andalusia and responsible for managing emergency services), to which you refer.