High Output Left Ventricular Pacing in Chronic Heart Failure

  • Research type

    Research Study

  • Full title

    Tailoring Pacemaker Output to Physiology in Chronic Heart Failure

  • IRAS ID

    258781

  • Contact name

    Klaus Witte

  • Contact email

    k.k.witte@leeds.ac.uk

  • Sponsor organisation

    University of Leeds

  • Clinicaltrials.gov Identifier

    NCT03781427

  • Duration of Study in the UK

    2 years, 11 months, 30 days

  • Research summary

    Chronic heart failure (CHF) is a condition of breathless or fatigue due to abnormalities of heart pumping function and in half of all CHF patients, this takes the form of heart muscle weakness. In this group, despite optimal medical and device therapy, a large proportion have persistent symptoms. Many of these have a retuning pacemaker routinely to try to improve the heart's contraction.
    The stimulus produced by a pacemaker is traditionally programmed to be just above the level required to make the heart beat. In the case of people with CHF however, this might not lead to activation of all of the heart muscle cells simultaneously. We want to find out if a higher level stimulus can improve heart pumping function. To do this we will do three studies. Patients can participate in just the first one, or all three.
    Study 1 will compare the effect on heart pumping function at rest and at higher heart rates with normal and high outputs and how this relates to other markers of the severity of the condition. Study 2 will explore whether high output pacing improves exercise acutely and study 3 will try to establish whether high output pacing is safe and whether it improves exercise capacity, quality of life and heart function more than standard output pacing over 6 months.

  • REC name

    Wales REC 5

  • REC reference

    19/WA/0100

  • Date of REC Opinion

    3 Apr 2019

  • REC opinion

    Further Information Favourable Opinion