Implantable sensors to assess cardiac function

The quest to discover effective methodologies to monitor the course of disease and response to therapeutic agents in patients with chronic heart failure continues. Clinical trials of specific therapeutic agents have shown efficacy in large groups of patients, but the outcome even with the most effective agents is recognized to be heterogeneous for largely unexplained reasons. The idea that the treatment of individual patients with heart failure could be guided by serial measurements of surrogate end points for mortality and morbidity remains attractive to clinicians. A new approach for clinicians is the guiding of heart failure care by hemodynamic implantable sensors, and in this paper, a brief review of the implantable technologies available to assess cardiac function for monitoring the course of chronic heart failure (CHF) is presented. Early results suggest that measurements arising from these implantable devices should help in guiding the long-term management of CHF patients. Careful consideration of measurements to make, end points to assess, and therapy in control patients will be essential in validating new approaches.