Hypertension-Reply

In Reply.  —Thank you for reminding us that much that is "new" is a rediscovery of older ideas. Our article did not review the older literature about the use of the Fantus titration test¹ to monitor dietary sodium intake as used by Arthur Grollman and Bryant et al.² For whatever reasons, this simple procedure seems to have been replaced with more sophisticated automated machines, which provide data more accurate than needed and too late to be of much use. The chloride stick (Quantab) is less cumbersome than the Fantus procedure. We hope the chloride stick will be more widely used.The evidence of the efficacy of a low sodium diet in the treatment of hypertension goes back to the Frenchmen Ambard and Beaujard³ and to the American Allen.⁴ With the advent of diuretics, most physicians and patients eagerly gave up the more restricted diets, eg, the