Response to: Studying the blood pressures of antegrade and retrograde internal mammary vessels: Do they really work as recipient vessels? Tomioka YK, Uda H, Yoshimura K, Sunaga A, Kamochi H, Sugawara Y. J Plast Reconstr Aesthet Surg. 2017 Oct;70(10):1391-1396.

We congratulate Tomioka et al. on an interesting article assessing intraoperatively the arterial and venous pressures in both the antegrade and retrograde limbs of the internal mammary vessels.1 The authors report positively on the recorded arterial and venous pressures in the retrograde vessels, demonstrating clearly that in their series of ten free flap breast reconstructions, there is adequate arterial flow and sufficiently low venous back pressure to allow perfusion of a second microsurgery recipient site.