It’s a new age for heart failure (HF) management, with growing appreciation for its “four pillars” of drug therapy, but also, it appears, the waning status of left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) as the foremost guide to which patients should be treated with them. The metric, usually obtained by echocardiography, is viewed by some as […]
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Pulmonary artery (PA) pressure monitoring reduced hospitalizations of obese patients with heart failure, regardless of ejection fraction (EF), in a post-hoc analysis of the CardioMEMS Post Approval Study. “I personally expected more obese patients to have a greater benefit,” Dr. D. Marshall Brinkley of Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville […]
NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – Empagliflozin reduced the risk of adverse cardiovascular and renal outcomes in heart failure patients regardless of baseline NT-proBNP levels, researchers say. Empagliflozin is a sodium-glucose cotransporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitor, now considered a foundational treatment for chronic heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. The EMPEROR-Reduced trial showed a 25% reduction with empagliflozin […]
A 3-month lifestyle intervention that used a step counter and regular, personalized text messages to encourage increased mobility and adherence to medications led to a substantial rise in the quality of life in a randomized controlled study with 187 U.S. patients with heart failure and diabetes. The TARGET-HF-DM study supplied a wrist-worn step counting device […]
The new guideline on management of heart failure (HF) from the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) seemed to bear an asterisk or footnote even before its full unveiling in the early hours of ESC Congress 2021. The document would offer little new in the arena of HF with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), so understandably the […]
Hemodynamic guided management may reduce heart failure hospitalizations in patients with earlier stage heart failure, according to late breaking research presented in a Hot Line session today at ESC Congress 2021 and published in The Lancet. The observed reduction did not reach statistical significance in the overall analysis, but was statistically significant when limited to […]
Medical therapy for heart failure (HF) guided by an implanted pulmonary artery pressure (PAP) sensor didn’t improve survival or risk for HF events like hospitalization over a year in a major randomized trial that entered a broad range of patients with mild to moderate disease. But medical therapy adjustments based on PAP readings from the […]
(Reuters Health) – Survival of elderly heart transplant recipients at five years is similar to that of younger recipients even though older adults are more likely to get organs from higher-risk donors, a recent study suggests. Researchers examined data on 57,285 adults listed for heart transplantation from 2000 to 2018, including 1,203 (2.1%) patients aged […]
A new study is providing what researchers are calling “unique and important insights” into potential mechanisms contributing to the Takotsubo syndrome (TTS) also known as “broken heart syndrome.” Results from the retrospective case-control study suggest that chronically heightened stress-associated neurobiological activity may affect both the risk for, and timing of, subsequent TTS. “The findings suggest […]
A modeling study suggests a majority of adult COVID-19 hospitalizations nationwide are attributable to at least one of four pre-existing conditions: obesity, hypertension, diabetes, and heart failure, in that order. The study, published today in the Journal of the American Heart Association (JAHA) and led by researchers at the Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman […]
