Research News In Brief

PREVENT-HF: CardioDynamics, manufacturer of the BioZ impedance cardiography system, launches the randomized, controlled PREVENT-HF trial to compare BioZ monitoring to standard clinical care for management of chronic heart failure. The trial is designed to demonstrate the value of impedance cardiography data in guiding treatment decisions and reduce hospitalizations of heart failure patients. The trial will enroll about 500 patients at 35 centers, and each patient will be followed from six to 12 months. The exact number of patients will be determined by the rate of adverse events; the trial will be complete when 212 heart failure-related hospitalizations have been recorded. PREVENT-HF is a follow-on trial to CardioDynamics' PREDICT study, which demonstrated that the proprietary BioZ scoring algorithm was a powerful and independent measure of risk for near-term, heart failure-related adverse events, including hospitalization, emergency room visits and death (1"The Gray Sheet" Sept. 20, 2004, p. 18)...