We thank Ömer Kartal and Ayşe Tuğba Kartal for the interest shown in our article. Regarding the issues they have raised, although not referred to in our methods, they were indeed part of our exclusion criteria, namely, the absence of any chronic or acute inflammatory or infectious conditions, as well as any form of ongoing pharmacological therapy.
Regarding the disparity in the sample sizes, the program we used to calculate the respective dimensions gave us an effect size of 0.5, a power (1-β err prob) of 0.8 and a p<0.05.