In Reply We thank Bhatti and Sivakumaran for their comments on our article.1 First, the authors mention the relatively low mean age of 58 years of our cohort (this includes 1 child of 4 years). The patients in the Basilar Artery International Cooperation Study (BASICS) had a mean age of 63 years.2 We think it is unlikely that this difference of 5 years has had an important influence on the results. Moreover, BASICS is a prospective patient registry, without stringent inclusion criteria. This suggests that patients with basilar artery occlusion have a lower age compared with patients with anterior circulation stroke.