From the authors:
We would like to thank C.G.A. Persson and L. Uller for their interesting observations and suggestions concerning our recently published article [1]. Also, we would like to comment the issues they have raised.
As they point out, we performed our study in patients (and controls), using blood and bronchoalveolar lavage (BAL) neutrophils for in vivo/ex vivo experiments. We did not include tissue samples due to the difficulty of obtaining them, just as C.G.A. Persson and L. Uller acknowledge. We analysed neutrophils from BAL fluid from non-responding community-acquired pneumonia (NCAP) patients to whom bronchoscopy was indicated and had signed informed consent. Bronchoscopy has the advantage of being a technique that is able to sample around 106 alveoli and, in addition, it is indicated for patients with NCAP [2]. All this could give relevant …