17 and studied as a strategy to provide physician guidance of patient self management in the HOMEOSTASIS trial.18 An ongoing trial called LAPTOP19 is studying the same technology in NYHA-III patients (low and preserved ejection fraction) who are on optimal medical therapy; the objective is to assess if a physician-directed patient self-management system guided by left atrial pressure will reduce HF hospitalizations. The study is expected to be complete by August 2013. ICD/CRT Device Diagnostics Monitoring for Heart Failure Implantable cardioverter

Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical defibrillators (ICD)/cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT) is mainstay treatment for heart failure patients. Data from 234 hospitals across United States participating in the Get With the Guidelines initiative showed that approximately 25% of patients hospitalized for heart failure either had or were eligible for Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical an ICD.20 Thoracic impedance can be measured with these implanted devices and has been considered as a surrogate marker of pulmonary congestion. When a current is Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical passed between the intracardiac lead and the generator, the lower the impedance to the conduction of this current, the higher the fluid content of the lungs (as fluid is a better conductor than air). In a validation study, Yu et al.21 found that the impedance started to decrease 15 days prior to worsening heart failure symptoms. Also, the change in impedance had a high correlation to change in

pulmonary capillary wedge pressure in a subset of patients with Swan-Ganz monitoring. Utilizing a threshold Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical value of 60 Ω days, the authors found 76% sensitivity and 1.5 false-positive HF decompensations per patient-year of monitoring. In a more recent study of HF patients, Abraham et al. showed that the sensitivity of intrathoracic impedance monitoring was far superior to daily weight monitoring for predicting worsening HF events.22 On the contrary,

the SENSE-HF trial failed to show utility of the same technology,23 and also revealed many practical uncertainties such as unreliability of impedance testing early after implant. The sensitivity to predict HF events was at best Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical 42% with a positive predictive valve of 38%. The DOT-HF trial24 studied the clinical utility of the OptiVol® (Medtronic, Inc., Minneapolis, MN) implantable monitoring tool to track changes in intrathoracic impedance. The trial was halted early due to under-recruitment. All-cause mortality and rehospitalizations did not change from selleck control to impedance-monitored therapy. Phosphatidylinositol diacylglycerol-lyase Also, post-hoc analysis showed that even if recruitment was optimal, there would not have been a significant result. Current efforts are ongoing in the Optilink-HF trial,25 where an OptiVol/CareLink® system (Medtronic, Inc., Minneapolis, MN) is being used to provide physicians with wireless alerts of threshold deviations for worsening cardiac status. To increase the predictive ability of a diagnostic algorithm, Whellan et al.