October 2, 2009 – Results from a multicenter study of Cheetah Medical's Exercise Cardiac Output (ECO) stress test protocol for chronic heart failure were published earlier this month in the Journal of Cardiac Failure, the official journal of the Heart Failure Society of America and the Japanese Heart Failure Society. With approximately 6 million Americans diagnosed with heart failure, it is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality. After heart failure is diagnosed, the one-year mortality rate is high, with one in five dying. Eighty percent of men and 70 percent of women 65 years of age who have heart failure will die within eight years, and one in eight U.S. deaths has HF mentioned on the death certificate. Unfortunately, heart failure specialists have limited tools with which to monitor heart failure progression, determine prognosis and response to treatment. Recently, it was shown that peak cardiac output and peak cardiac power output are the strongest predictors of heart failure severity, however access to these current methods is limited to a minute portion of heart failure patients due to cost and complexity of the devices. In this study, Cheetah Medical's NICOM system was used to continuously monitor the cardiac output response during exercise stress testing as well as cardiac power output and a host of other hemodynamic parameters in patients with varying degrees of chronic heart failure and compared to the traditional method of measuring oxygen consumption which are obtained from analysis of expired gases. The results from both methods correlated extremely well, demonstrating the potential to use the NICOM system to routinely monitor heart failure patients without the significant limitations of expired breath gas technologies. “We continually search for practical means of assessing the status of our heart failure patients that are useful both for routine clinical practice and for clinical research,” said Matthew Maurer, M.D., director of the clinical cardiovascular research laboratory for the elderly, associate professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University Medical Center and the study's primary investigator. “Although the usefulness of measuring oxygen consumption is well established, these data suggest that additional physiologic and prognostic information can be obtained using the NICOM, which is as easy to measure as an electrocardiogram and does not require special training for its interpretation." Daniel Burkhoff, M.D., Ph.D., is the medical director of Cheetah Medical, an adjunct associate professor of Medicine at Columbia University Medical School and a leading clinical researcher in the field of heart failure. "With the results of this study showing good correlations to oxygen consumption and several prior independent studies showing that peak cardiac power can be even more predictive of outcomes, we are encouraged that we will see these measurements used more often in a variety of settings,” Dr. Burkhoff said. “Currently, the NICOM appears to offer the simplest solution for clinicians to measure cardiac output and power during exercise. We are planning a large multicenter study to confirm the prior smaller studies to prove the utility of peak cardiac power for predicting the risks of hospitalizations, the need for heart transplant, left ventricular assist devices and mortality." For more information: www.cheetah-medical.com
November 18, 2024 
