title: "Walking with Only Non-Invasive Ventilation in Stable Hypercapnic COPD Patients: Sufficient or Not?".
abstract: We are grateful to Ulasli and Esquinas for their comments to our paper.. They argued that arterial blood gas analyses were not performed without oxygen prior to the 6-minute walk test with noninvasive ventilation (6MWT-NPPV). This point has already been discussed in our original work by indicating the limitations of our study. The reason for using oxygen prior to exercise testing was to guarantee comparable starting conditions.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Pneumology , University Hospital Freiburg , Germany.|b Department of Pneumology and Intensive Care Medicine , Academic Teaching Hospital Klinikum Konstanz , Germany.
authors.forename: David J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Walker
authors.affiliation: b Department of Pneumology and Intensive Care Medicine , Academic Teaching Hospital Klinikum Konstanz , Germany.
authors.forename: Wolfram
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Windisch
authors.affiliation: c Department of Pneumology , Cologne-Merheim Hospital , Germany.
authors.forename: Michael
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Dreher
mesh_terms: D001784:Blood Gas Analysis; D006801:Humans; D006935:Hypercapnia; D063087:Noninvasive Ventilation; D029424:Pulmonary Disease, Chronic Obstructive; D016138:Walking
keywords: COPD; noninvasive ventilation