Lung Impedance Monitoring In Treatment of Chronic Heart Failure

Summary

Heart failure is a major clinical problem that is increasing in magnitude and the cost of management of heart failure is escalating. A significant part of this cost is related to unplanned acute presentation to emergency departments and hospitalisation with worsening shortness of breath due to increased fluid content in the lungs.

Many heart failure patients are already fitted with defibrillators to protect them from the risk of fast heart rhythms and sudden death and are followed up in both the heart failure clinics and defibrillator clinics. Recently some of the defibrillators fitted have been equipped with an extra function that can detect and warn of changes in the fluid content of the lungs very early even before the patient starts to complain of any shortness of breath and before any signs of fluid overload are seen clinically. However, it is not known how to deal with these warnings if they occur very early and it is not known whether a medical intervention at his stage is beneficial to prevent progression and eventual hospital admission. In the majority of cases, early warnings of this kind are ignored or this function is disabled at implantation of the device.

The current study will involve patients who have already been fitted with a device with the above capability. The investigators will use the new function to guide management of these patients and compare their outcome with similar patients who are fitted with devices without it. The investigators will attempt to manage early warnings by a predetermined increase in medications in a group of patients and compare their clinical course to a similar group in whom no action is taken.

Conditions

• Heart Failure

Interventions

DRUG

Preset increase in frusemide dose

All patients in Group 1 will have the Optivol function and alerts switched on. Optivol levels will be downloaded monthly via the Medtronic Carelink Network (for those patients who have it) or during pacemaker follow up appointments. If the Optivol alarm goes off, all patients will be requested to contact a member of the research team by phone and those with rising Optivol (irrespective of the presence or absence of heart failure symptoms) will be requested to increase the dose of diuretic that they are on by 50% for 1 week then revert to their usual dose after 7 days. A routine renal function check will be performed at the end of the week.

OTHER

No intervention

The Optivol data for these patients will be downloaded periodically (at each scheduled device check) and recorded but will not be available at follow up in the heart failure clinic.. These patients will act as controls for group 1 patients. They will undergo baseline investigations and then will undergo routine heart failure treatment and follow-up in the heart failure clinic. These will include a routine clinical evaluation, body weight and blood analysis as per the heart failure clinic protocol. Medications will be reviewed and changed according to clinical needs.

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Barts & The London NHS Trust

  lead OTHER

Principal Investigators

• Richard J Schilling, Md FRCP · Barts and the London NHS Trust, Queen Mary University of London

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

TREATMENT

Masking

NONE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

18 Years

Sex

ALL

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2010-09-30

Primary Completion

2014-10-31

Completion

2014-12-31

Countries

• United Kingdom

Study Locations