Contact: Tracy Bischoff
(205) 934-8935
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STUDY LOOKS AT WAYS TO RESTORE PROPER HEARTBEAT
Just in time for Heart Failure Awareness Week (Feb. 14-18), Robert C. Bourge, MD, director of UAB's Division of Cardiovascular Disease, Neal Kay, M.D., director of Electrophysiology, and other UAB researchers are beginning a study on an innovative therapy for advanced heart failure intended to make a sick heart beat more effectively.
If successful, the new heart resynchronization therapy could augment medication in treating heart failure symptoms such as fatigue, difficulty in breathing, dizziness and an uncomfortable swelling of feet and ankles. The study is part of a national clinical trial called the MIRACLE trial evaluating this therapy in patients with heart failure and abnormal heart conduction (the passage of electrical current through the heart). Up to 50 percent of patients with heart failure have conduction problems in the heart.
All patients enrolled in the clinical evaluation will receive the new device -- which is implanted just below the skin in the chest area. It's all done with a small incision and local anesthesia, not the major open-chest surgery used in earlier procedures to access the left side of the heart.
Two insulated wires from the device are then threaded through veins to contact points inside the right atrium and ventricle. A third wire is maneuvered through a vein in the heart that leads to the left ventricle. Without major surgery, UAB cardiologists will use the implanted device to deliver electrical impulses that stimulate the left and right chambers of the patient's heart to beat in a synchronized fashion.
"Not only is this device less invasive than previous ways to utilize this therapy, it is also much more programmable, so that the impulses can be timed with an individual's heartbeat," Bourge said. About 500,000 heart failure cases are newly diagnosed annually. Bourge said 40 to 50 percent of UAB's severe heart failure patients have dysynchrony -- or abnormalities of conduction of the heart's electrical impulses that control the heart's contractions.
"Experience in over 150 patients to date with this type of therapy has shown improvement in symptoms of heart failure and the contraction of the heart lasting for many months to years," Bourge said.
The study is open to patients who have relatively advanced heart failure and a disturbance of their heart's electrical system that interferes with proper synchronized pumping of its left and right ventricles.
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