We thank Dr Kawada for his comments on our study [1]. He raised some concerns regarding the effect of mid-day sleep on alertness and performance as well as health outcomes. He based his concerns on three articles [2–4]. First of all, in these three articles the sample observed were healthy subjects (in one paper [3] subjects were sleep deprived) and not hypertensive patients as it was in our study [5]. So the characteristics of the sample are completely different. In addition, in the articles of Takahashi M et al; [2,3], the authors assessed the effect of midday sleep only on alertness and performance, which is a field completely different from our study, since we assessed the effect of naps on blood pressure (BP) levels.
