Response to the Letter by Devaux et al

We thank Devaux et al1 for their interest in our work published in a recent issue of Circulation Research .2 We have carefully read their comments and replied to them. First, we are afraid that there are some misunderstandings about our studies, including the study design. For the first screening in the study, we randomly selected 7 patients who experienced development of heart failure (HF) within a year after discharge from the hospital after acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and 7 matched control subjects who did not experience any cardiac events for 2 years after AMI using propensity score, as described in the Supplemental Materials of the original article.2 In the validation phase, we examined associations between HF development and circulating levels of candidate microRNAs (miRs) selected on the basis of the results of the first screening in a total of 86 post-AMI patients. Through these processes and additional experiments, we concluded that circulating levels of p53-responsive miRs were increased from the early convalescent stage (median, 18 days after onset) in post-AMI patients who survived the acute stage of AMI but developed HF within a year.2 Devaux et al1 claimed that our study had a limitation …