Author`s Reply.

To the Editor,

We thank the authors for their valuable evaluation of our article entitled “Evaluation of Tp-e interval, Tp-e/QT ratio, and Tp-e/QTc ratio in patients with Behçet’s disease. Anatol J Cardiol 2019; 22: 85-90’’(1).

Colchicine has been used for treating various cardiac diseases such as pericarditis and postablation atrial fibrillation. As indicated by the authors, various studies have shown that colchicine may affect cardiac functions (2). Frommeyer et al. (3) showed that colchicine had no effects on the QT interval and dispersion, whereas Ocal et al. (4) reported lower Tp-e and Tp-e/QT values in patients with familial Mediterranean fever who were treated with colchicine for 1-year. As mentioned by the authors, 57% of the patients with Behçet’s disease received colchicine treatment. Naturally, ECG parameters may be affected in patients with Behçet’s disease using colchicine. Therefore, we reviewed the data and performed subgroup analysis. We observed that Tp-e, cTp-e, Tp-e/QT, Tp-e/cQT, and QTd parameters were not statistically significant between the groups with or without colchicine treatment (p>0.05 for all). Since our study is not a follow-up study, it is not possible to compare ECG parameters before and after colchicine treatment. It is worth to re-evaluate with a different study design. In future large-scale studies, the effects of colchicine on ECG parameters in patients with Behçet’s disease can be shown more clearly.