American Heart Association Meeting In Brief

Evidence-Based HF treatment: Eligible heart failure patients in the United States are underutilizing professional guideline-recommended device and drug treatments, according to data from the Medtronic-sponsored, 40,000-patient IMPROVE HF registry presented at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions in Orlando Nov. 7. According to the registry data, only about 39% of eligible patients are receiving cardiac resynchronization therapy and about 51% of indicated patients receive an implantable defibrillator. The registry also found that 36% of eligible patients are taking aldosterone antagonist drugs to manage congestive heart failure and 69% of eligible patients receive anticoagulants to mitigate the risk of atrial fibrillation. About 61% of patients receive heart failure education. Previous data from IMPROVE HF showed that, overall, fewer than 30% of patients were getting all the therapies they were eligible for under the guidelines, with women and older patients the most likely to be undertreated (1"The Gray Sheet" Sept. 25, 2006, p. 5)