Managing heart failure patients: when good-old-fashioned clinical care is not enough

摘要

The question arises whether clinicians dealing with heart-failure patients will soon have a whole armamentarium from which one or the other device can just be picked. As mentioned before, there is no clear rationale to choose one device over the other unless its intended purpose is undoubtedly demonstrated in a randomised trial. Therefore, the ImPressure, as well as other devices, still has a long way to go. However, the idea of developing devices for the sole purpose of monitoring impending deterioration is appealing. Many heart-failure patients are not going to be implanted with defibrillators or resynchronisation pacemakers. To limit our monitoring methods to those that can be provided as "addons" to those devices will deprive this large group of patients from the potential benefits of monitoring. This new transvenously deployable ultra-sonically communicating device is, therefore, potentially valuable as offering monitoring opportunities equitably across the full spectrum of heart failure patients.