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EMPEROR-Preserved: Empagliflozin’s HFpEF efficacy catalyzes a heart failure redefinition
Groundbreaking results from the EMPEROR-Preserved trial did more than establish for the first time that a drug, empagliflozin, has clearly proven efficacy for treating patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). The results also helped catalyze a paradigm shift in how heart failure thought leaders think about the role of ejection fraction for making important distinctions among patients with heart failure.
EMPEROR-Preserved may also be the final nail in the coffin for defining patients with heart failure as having HFpEF or heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF).
This new consensus essentially throws out left ventricular ejection fraction (EF) as the key metric for matching patients to heart failure treatments. Experts have instead begun suggesting a more unified treatment approach for all heart failure patients regardless of their EF.
‘Forget about ejection fraction’
“We encourage you to forget about ejection fraction,” declared Milton Packer, MD, during discussion at a session of the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America. “We certainly encourage you to forget about an ejection fraction of less than 40%” as having special significance,” added Dr. Packer, a lead investigator for both the EMPEROR-Reduced and EMPEROR-Preserved trials (which researchers combined in a unified analysis with a total of 9,718 patients with heart failure called EMPEROR-Pooled), and a heart failure researcher at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
“The 40% ejection fraction divide is artificial. It was created in 2003 as part of a trial design, but it has no physiological significance,” Dr. Packer explained. A much better way to distinguish systolic and diastolic heart failure is by strain assessment rather than by ejection fraction. “Strain is a measure of myocardial shortening, a measure of what the heart does. Ejection fraction is a measure of volume,” said Dr. Packer. “Sign me up to get rid of ejection fraction,” he added.
“Ejection fraction is not as valuable as we thought for distinguishing the therapeutic benefit” of heart failure drugs, agreed Marvin A. Konstam, MD, professor of medicine at Tufts University and chief physician executive of the CardioVascular Center of Tufts Medical Center, both in Boston, who spoke during a different session at the meeting.
“It would easier if we didn’t spend time parsing this number,” ejection fraction, commented Clyde W. Yancy, MD, professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “Wouldn’t it be easier if we said that every patient with heart failure needs to receive one agent from each of the four [pillar] drug classes, and put them in a polypill” at reduced dosages, he proposed, envisioning one potential consequence of jettisoning ejection fraction.
The four pillar drug classes, recently identified as essential for patients with HFrEF but until now not endorsed for patients with HFpEF, are the sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, such as empagliflozin (Jardiance); an angiotensin receptor blocker neprilysin inhibitor compound such as sacubitril/valsartan (Entresto); beta-blockers; and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists such as spironolactone and eplerenone.
An opportunity for ‘simpler and easier’ treatments
“This is an opportunity to disrupt the way we’ve been doing things and think about something that is simpler and easier,” said Dr. Yancy, who chaired some of the panels serially formed by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology to write guidelines for treating heart failure. “An approach that would be easier to implement without worrying about staggering the start of each drug class and an incessant focus on titrating individual elements and taking 6 months to get to a certain place.”
Results from EMPEROR-Preserved and the combined EMPEROR-Pooled analysis triggered these paradigm-shifting sentiments by showing clear evidence that treatment with empagliflozin exerts consistent benefit – and is consistently safe – for patients with heart failure across a spectrum of EFs, from less than 25% to 64%, though its performance in patients with HFpEF and EFs of 65% or greater in the EMPEROR-Preserved trial remains unclear.
The consequence is that clinicians should feel comfortable prescribing empagliflozin to most patients with heart failure without regard to EF, even patients with EF values in the mid-60% range.
The EMPEROR-Preserved results showed a clear signal of attenuated benefit among patients with an EF of 65% or greater “on a population basis,” stressed Dr. Packer. “But on an individual basis, ejection fraction is not that reproducible, so measuring ejection fraction will not help you determine whom to treat or not treat. “
“There is significant variability” measuring EF using the most common modality, echocardiography, noted Javed Butler, MD, an EMPEROR coinvestigator who also spoke at the meeting session. A person with a measured EF of 65% could actually have a value that may be as low as 58% or as high as about 72%, noted Dr. Butler, who is professor and chair of medicine at the University of Mississippi, Jackson. The upshot is that any patient diagnosed with heart failure should receive an SGLT2 inhibitor “irrespective of their ejection fraction,” Dr. Butler advised.
“Ejection fraction is very crude, and probably not sufficient to identify a phenotype,” for treatment, said Dr. Yancy. “The real takeaway may be that we need to revisit what we call HFrEF, and then let that be the new standard for treatment.”
“Is [an EF of] 60% the new 40%?” asked Dr. Packer, implying that the answer was yes.
Results from several trials suggest redefining HFrEF
The idea that patients without traditionally defined HFrEF – an EF of 40% or less – could also benefit from other classes of heart failure drugs has been gestating for a while, and then rose to a new level with the August 2021 report of results from EMPEROR-Preserved. Two years ago, in September 2019, Dr. Butler, Dr. Packer, and a third colleague advanced the notion of redefining HFrEF by raising the ejection fraction ceiling in a published commentary.
They cited the experience with the angiotensin receptor blocker candesartan in a post hoc analysis of data collected in the CHARM-Preserved trial, which showed a strong signal of benefit in the subgroup of patients with EFs of 41%-49%, but not in those with an EF of 50% or higher. This finding prompted Dr. Konstam to express doubts about relying on EF to define heart failure subgroups in trials and guide management in a commentary published more than 3 years ago.
Another crack in the traditional EF framework came from analysis of results from the TOPCAT trial that tested spironolactone as a treatment for patients with HFpEF, according to the 2019 opinion published by Dr. Butler and Dr. Packer. Once again a post hoc analysis, this time using data from TOPCAT, suggested a benefit from the mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist spironolactone in patients with heart failure and an EF of 45%-49% (45% was the minimum EF for enrollment into the study).
Recently, data from a third trial that tested sacubitril/valsartan in patients with HFpEF, PARAGON-HF, showed benefit among patients with EFs below the study median of 57%. This finding led the Food and Drug Administration in February 2021 to amend its initial approval for sacubitril/valsartan by removing a specific EF ceiling from the drug’s indication and instead saying that patient’s receiving the drug should have a “below normal” EF.
Writing in a recent commentary, Dr. Yancy called the FDA’s action on sacubitril/valsartan “reasonable,” and that the subgroup assessment of data from the PARAGON-HF trial creates a “new, reasonably evidence-based therapy for HFpEF.” He also predicted that guideline-writing panels will “likely align with a permissive statement of indication” for sacubitril/valsartan in patients with HFpEF, especially those with EFs of less than 57%.
The idea of using an SGLT2 inhibitor like empagliflozin on all heart failure patients, and also adding agents like sacubitril/valsartan and spironolactone in patients with HFpEF and EFs in the mid-50% range or lower may take some time to catch on, but it already has one influential advocate.
“If a patient has HFpEF with an EF of less than 55%, use quadruple-class therapy,” summed up Dr. Butler during the HFSA session, while also suggesting prescribing an SGLT2 inhibitor to essentially all patients with heart failure regardless of their EF.
The EMPEROR-Preserved and EMPEROR-Reduced trials and the EMPEROR-Pooled analysis were sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim and Lilly, the companies that jointly market empagliflozin (Jardiance). Dr. Packer has had financial relationships with BI and Lilly and numerous other companies. Dr. Konstam has served on data monitoring committees for trials funded by Boehringer Ingelheim and by Amgen, Luitpold, and Pfizer, and has been a consultant to Arena, LivaNova, Merck, SC Pharma, and Takeda. Dr. Yancy had no disclosures. Dr. Butler has had financial relationships with Boehringer Ingelheim and numerous other companies.
Groundbreaking results from the EMPEROR-Preserved trial did more than establish for the first time that a drug, empagliflozin, has clearly proven efficacy for treating patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). The results also helped catalyze a paradigm shift in how heart failure thought leaders think about the role of ejection fraction for making important distinctions among patients with heart failure.
EMPEROR-Preserved may also be the final nail in the coffin for defining patients with heart failure as having HFpEF or heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF).
This new consensus essentially throws out left ventricular ejection fraction (EF) as the key metric for matching patients to heart failure treatments. Experts have instead begun suggesting a more unified treatment approach for all heart failure patients regardless of their EF.
‘Forget about ejection fraction’
“We encourage you to forget about ejection fraction,” declared Milton Packer, MD, during discussion at a session of the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America. “We certainly encourage you to forget about an ejection fraction of less than 40%” as having special significance,” added Dr. Packer, a lead investigator for both the EMPEROR-Reduced and EMPEROR-Preserved trials (which researchers combined in a unified analysis with a total of 9,718 patients with heart failure called EMPEROR-Pooled), and a heart failure researcher at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
“The 40% ejection fraction divide is artificial. It was created in 2003 as part of a trial design, but it has no physiological significance,” Dr. Packer explained. A much better way to distinguish systolic and diastolic heart failure is by strain assessment rather than by ejection fraction. “Strain is a measure of myocardial shortening, a measure of what the heart does. Ejection fraction is a measure of volume,” said Dr. Packer. “Sign me up to get rid of ejection fraction,” he added.
“Ejection fraction is not as valuable as we thought for distinguishing the therapeutic benefit” of heart failure drugs, agreed Marvin A. Konstam, MD, professor of medicine at Tufts University and chief physician executive of the CardioVascular Center of Tufts Medical Center, both in Boston, who spoke during a different session at the meeting.
“It would easier if we didn’t spend time parsing this number,” ejection fraction, commented Clyde W. Yancy, MD, professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “Wouldn’t it be easier if we said that every patient with heart failure needs to receive one agent from each of the four [pillar] drug classes, and put them in a polypill” at reduced dosages, he proposed, envisioning one potential consequence of jettisoning ejection fraction.
The four pillar drug classes, recently identified as essential for patients with HFrEF but until now not endorsed for patients with HFpEF, are the sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, such as empagliflozin (Jardiance); an angiotensin receptor blocker neprilysin inhibitor compound such as sacubitril/valsartan (Entresto); beta-blockers; and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists such as spironolactone and eplerenone.
An opportunity for ‘simpler and easier’ treatments
“This is an opportunity to disrupt the way we’ve been doing things and think about something that is simpler and easier,” said Dr. Yancy, who chaired some of the panels serially formed by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology to write guidelines for treating heart failure. “An approach that would be easier to implement without worrying about staggering the start of each drug class and an incessant focus on titrating individual elements and taking 6 months to get to a certain place.”
Results from EMPEROR-Preserved and the combined EMPEROR-Pooled analysis triggered these paradigm-shifting sentiments by showing clear evidence that treatment with empagliflozin exerts consistent benefit – and is consistently safe – for patients with heart failure across a spectrum of EFs, from less than 25% to 64%, though its performance in patients with HFpEF and EFs of 65% or greater in the EMPEROR-Preserved trial remains unclear.
The consequence is that clinicians should feel comfortable prescribing empagliflozin to most patients with heart failure without regard to EF, even patients with EF values in the mid-60% range.
The EMPEROR-Preserved results showed a clear signal of attenuated benefit among patients with an EF of 65% or greater “on a population basis,” stressed Dr. Packer. “But on an individual basis, ejection fraction is not that reproducible, so measuring ejection fraction will not help you determine whom to treat or not treat. “
“There is significant variability” measuring EF using the most common modality, echocardiography, noted Javed Butler, MD, an EMPEROR coinvestigator who also spoke at the meeting session. A person with a measured EF of 65% could actually have a value that may be as low as 58% or as high as about 72%, noted Dr. Butler, who is professor and chair of medicine at the University of Mississippi, Jackson. The upshot is that any patient diagnosed with heart failure should receive an SGLT2 inhibitor “irrespective of their ejection fraction,” Dr. Butler advised.
“Ejection fraction is very crude, and probably not sufficient to identify a phenotype,” for treatment, said Dr. Yancy. “The real takeaway may be that we need to revisit what we call HFrEF, and then let that be the new standard for treatment.”
“Is [an EF of] 60% the new 40%?” asked Dr. Packer, implying that the answer was yes.
Results from several trials suggest redefining HFrEF
The idea that patients without traditionally defined HFrEF – an EF of 40% or less – could also benefit from other classes of heart failure drugs has been gestating for a while, and then rose to a new level with the August 2021 report of results from EMPEROR-Preserved. Two years ago, in September 2019, Dr. Butler, Dr. Packer, and a third colleague advanced the notion of redefining HFrEF by raising the ejection fraction ceiling in a published commentary.
They cited the experience with the angiotensin receptor blocker candesartan in a post hoc analysis of data collected in the CHARM-Preserved trial, which showed a strong signal of benefit in the subgroup of patients with EFs of 41%-49%, but not in those with an EF of 50% or higher. This finding prompted Dr. Konstam to express doubts about relying on EF to define heart failure subgroups in trials and guide management in a commentary published more than 3 years ago.
Another crack in the traditional EF framework came from analysis of results from the TOPCAT trial that tested spironolactone as a treatment for patients with HFpEF, according to the 2019 opinion published by Dr. Butler and Dr. Packer. Once again a post hoc analysis, this time using data from TOPCAT, suggested a benefit from the mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist spironolactone in patients with heart failure and an EF of 45%-49% (45% was the minimum EF for enrollment into the study).
Recently, data from a third trial that tested sacubitril/valsartan in patients with HFpEF, PARAGON-HF, showed benefit among patients with EFs below the study median of 57%. This finding led the Food and Drug Administration in February 2021 to amend its initial approval for sacubitril/valsartan by removing a specific EF ceiling from the drug’s indication and instead saying that patient’s receiving the drug should have a “below normal” EF.
Writing in a recent commentary, Dr. Yancy called the FDA’s action on sacubitril/valsartan “reasonable,” and that the subgroup assessment of data from the PARAGON-HF trial creates a “new, reasonably evidence-based therapy for HFpEF.” He also predicted that guideline-writing panels will “likely align with a permissive statement of indication” for sacubitril/valsartan in patients with HFpEF, especially those with EFs of less than 57%.
The idea of using an SGLT2 inhibitor like empagliflozin on all heart failure patients, and also adding agents like sacubitril/valsartan and spironolactone in patients with HFpEF and EFs in the mid-50% range or lower may take some time to catch on, but it already has one influential advocate.
“If a patient has HFpEF with an EF of less than 55%, use quadruple-class therapy,” summed up Dr. Butler during the HFSA session, while also suggesting prescribing an SGLT2 inhibitor to essentially all patients with heart failure regardless of their EF.
The EMPEROR-Preserved and EMPEROR-Reduced trials and the EMPEROR-Pooled analysis were sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim and Lilly, the companies that jointly market empagliflozin (Jardiance). Dr. Packer has had financial relationships with BI and Lilly and numerous other companies. Dr. Konstam has served on data monitoring committees for trials funded by Boehringer Ingelheim and by Amgen, Luitpold, and Pfizer, and has been a consultant to Arena, LivaNova, Merck, SC Pharma, and Takeda. Dr. Yancy had no disclosures. Dr. Butler has had financial relationships with Boehringer Ingelheim and numerous other companies.
Groundbreaking results from the EMPEROR-Preserved trial did more than establish for the first time that a drug, empagliflozin, has clearly proven efficacy for treating patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). The results also helped catalyze a paradigm shift in how heart failure thought leaders think about the role of ejection fraction for making important distinctions among patients with heart failure.
EMPEROR-Preserved may also be the final nail in the coffin for defining patients with heart failure as having HFpEF or heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF).
This new consensus essentially throws out left ventricular ejection fraction (EF) as the key metric for matching patients to heart failure treatments. Experts have instead begun suggesting a more unified treatment approach for all heart failure patients regardless of their EF.
‘Forget about ejection fraction’
“We encourage you to forget about ejection fraction,” declared Milton Packer, MD, during discussion at a session of the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America. “We certainly encourage you to forget about an ejection fraction of less than 40%” as having special significance,” added Dr. Packer, a lead investigator for both the EMPEROR-Reduced and EMPEROR-Preserved trials (which researchers combined in a unified analysis with a total of 9,718 patients with heart failure called EMPEROR-Pooled), and a heart failure researcher at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
“The 40% ejection fraction divide is artificial. It was created in 2003 as part of a trial design, but it has no physiological significance,” Dr. Packer explained. A much better way to distinguish systolic and diastolic heart failure is by strain assessment rather than by ejection fraction. “Strain is a measure of myocardial shortening, a measure of what the heart does. Ejection fraction is a measure of volume,” said Dr. Packer. “Sign me up to get rid of ejection fraction,” he added.
“Ejection fraction is not as valuable as we thought for distinguishing the therapeutic benefit” of heart failure drugs, agreed Marvin A. Konstam, MD, professor of medicine at Tufts University and chief physician executive of the CardioVascular Center of Tufts Medical Center, both in Boston, who spoke during a different session at the meeting.
“It would easier if we didn’t spend time parsing this number,” ejection fraction, commented Clyde W. Yancy, MD, professor of medicine and chief of cardiology at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. “Wouldn’t it be easier if we said that every patient with heart failure needs to receive one agent from each of the four [pillar] drug classes, and put them in a polypill” at reduced dosages, he proposed, envisioning one potential consequence of jettisoning ejection fraction.
The four pillar drug classes, recently identified as essential for patients with HFrEF but until now not endorsed for patients with HFpEF, are the sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitors, such as empagliflozin (Jardiance); an angiotensin receptor blocker neprilysin inhibitor compound such as sacubitril/valsartan (Entresto); beta-blockers; and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists such as spironolactone and eplerenone.
An opportunity for ‘simpler and easier’ treatments
“This is an opportunity to disrupt the way we’ve been doing things and think about something that is simpler and easier,” said Dr. Yancy, who chaired some of the panels serially formed by the American Heart Association and American College of Cardiology to write guidelines for treating heart failure. “An approach that would be easier to implement without worrying about staggering the start of each drug class and an incessant focus on titrating individual elements and taking 6 months to get to a certain place.”
Results from EMPEROR-Preserved and the combined EMPEROR-Pooled analysis triggered these paradigm-shifting sentiments by showing clear evidence that treatment with empagliflozin exerts consistent benefit – and is consistently safe – for patients with heart failure across a spectrum of EFs, from less than 25% to 64%, though its performance in patients with HFpEF and EFs of 65% or greater in the EMPEROR-Preserved trial remains unclear.
The consequence is that clinicians should feel comfortable prescribing empagliflozin to most patients with heart failure without regard to EF, even patients with EF values in the mid-60% range.
The EMPEROR-Preserved results showed a clear signal of attenuated benefit among patients with an EF of 65% or greater “on a population basis,” stressed Dr. Packer. “But on an individual basis, ejection fraction is not that reproducible, so measuring ejection fraction will not help you determine whom to treat or not treat. “
“There is significant variability” measuring EF using the most common modality, echocardiography, noted Javed Butler, MD, an EMPEROR coinvestigator who also spoke at the meeting session. A person with a measured EF of 65% could actually have a value that may be as low as 58% or as high as about 72%, noted Dr. Butler, who is professor and chair of medicine at the University of Mississippi, Jackson. The upshot is that any patient diagnosed with heart failure should receive an SGLT2 inhibitor “irrespective of their ejection fraction,” Dr. Butler advised.
“Ejection fraction is very crude, and probably not sufficient to identify a phenotype,” for treatment, said Dr. Yancy. “The real takeaway may be that we need to revisit what we call HFrEF, and then let that be the new standard for treatment.”
“Is [an EF of] 60% the new 40%?” asked Dr. Packer, implying that the answer was yes.
Results from several trials suggest redefining HFrEF
The idea that patients without traditionally defined HFrEF – an EF of 40% or less – could also benefit from other classes of heart failure drugs has been gestating for a while, and then rose to a new level with the August 2021 report of results from EMPEROR-Preserved. Two years ago, in September 2019, Dr. Butler, Dr. Packer, and a third colleague advanced the notion of redefining HFrEF by raising the ejection fraction ceiling in a published commentary.
They cited the experience with the angiotensin receptor blocker candesartan in a post hoc analysis of data collected in the CHARM-Preserved trial, which showed a strong signal of benefit in the subgroup of patients with EFs of 41%-49%, but not in those with an EF of 50% or higher. This finding prompted Dr. Konstam to express doubts about relying on EF to define heart failure subgroups in trials and guide management in a commentary published more than 3 years ago.
Another crack in the traditional EF framework came from analysis of results from the TOPCAT trial that tested spironolactone as a treatment for patients with HFpEF, according to the 2019 opinion published by Dr. Butler and Dr. Packer. Once again a post hoc analysis, this time using data from TOPCAT, suggested a benefit from the mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist spironolactone in patients with heart failure and an EF of 45%-49% (45% was the minimum EF for enrollment into the study).
Recently, data from a third trial that tested sacubitril/valsartan in patients with HFpEF, PARAGON-HF, showed benefit among patients with EFs below the study median of 57%. This finding led the Food and Drug Administration in February 2021 to amend its initial approval for sacubitril/valsartan by removing a specific EF ceiling from the drug’s indication and instead saying that patient’s receiving the drug should have a “below normal” EF.
Writing in a recent commentary, Dr. Yancy called the FDA’s action on sacubitril/valsartan “reasonable,” and that the subgroup assessment of data from the PARAGON-HF trial creates a “new, reasonably evidence-based therapy for HFpEF.” He also predicted that guideline-writing panels will “likely align with a permissive statement of indication” for sacubitril/valsartan in patients with HFpEF, especially those with EFs of less than 57%.
The idea of using an SGLT2 inhibitor like empagliflozin on all heart failure patients, and also adding agents like sacubitril/valsartan and spironolactone in patients with HFpEF and EFs in the mid-50% range or lower may take some time to catch on, but it already has one influential advocate.
“If a patient has HFpEF with an EF of less than 55%, use quadruple-class therapy,” summed up Dr. Butler during the HFSA session, while also suggesting prescribing an SGLT2 inhibitor to essentially all patients with heart failure regardless of their EF.
The EMPEROR-Preserved and EMPEROR-Reduced trials and the EMPEROR-Pooled analysis were sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim and Lilly, the companies that jointly market empagliflozin (Jardiance). Dr. Packer has had financial relationships with BI and Lilly and numerous other companies. Dr. Konstam has served on data monitoring committees for trials funded by Boehringer Ingelheim and by Amgen, Luitpold, and Pfizer, and has been a consultant to Arena, LivaNova, Merck, SC Pharma, and Takeda. Dr. Yancy had no disclosures. Dr. Butler has had financial relationships with Boehringer Ingelheim and numerous other companies.
FROM HFSA 2021
Texts boost activity, quality of life in patients with heart failure and diabetes
A 3-month lifestyle intervention that used a step counter and regular, personalized text messages to encourage increased mobility and adherence to medications led to a substantial rise in the quality of life in a randomized controlled study with 187 U.S. patients with heart failure and diabetes.
The TARGET-HF-DM study supplied a wrist-worn step counting device to adults with any type of heart failure and any type of diabetes at six U.S. sites and collected data on daily step counts and medication adherence through smartphone-based apps. Researchers randomized the patients to an intervention of thrice-weekly text messages that gave them personalized feedback on their recent activity and adherence and updated activity and adherence goals, or to a control group that only received a once-weekly generic message to wear the step counter.
After 3 months, patients in the intervention arm had an average incremental gain of 313 steps per day from baseline, compared with the controls, a significant difference for the study’s primary endpoint, G. Michael Felker, MD, reported at the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America.
A ‘quite large’ increase in quality of life.
Perhaps more importantly, a secondary analysis assessed quality of life with the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) overall summary score, which showed after 3 months a 5.5-point average increased improvement among patients in the intervention arm, compared with controls. Score increases of 5 of more points on the KCCQ represent clinically meaningful changes.
This average, incremental KCCQ score improvement was “quite large relative to what we typically see in placebo-controlled trials of effective drugs,” said Dr. Felker, professor of medicine at Duke University, Durham, N.C., and director of cardiovascular research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. If a similar magnitude change in KCCQ was associated with a drug treatment “we would say it was an incredibly large signal in terms of quality of life, so I think the patients are telling us that [the intervention] is making a clinically important difference.”
But Dr. Felker cautioned that the study was not blinded, raising the possibility that the change in quality of life could have been partially explained by “patients feeling more engaged about doing something for their health.”
His report omitted data on the medication adherence facet of the study, which will come out in a subsequent report, raising the possibility that some of the quality of life benefit as well as the ability of patients to boost their step count was related to more consistent treatment with their prescribed medications, but Dr. Felker discounted this possibility.
“The adherence intervention was basically a digital tool that helped people better remember their medication regimen. While it is possible that this could have influenced the KCCQ data this seems quite unlikely to me,” he said in an interview.
‘Exercise is the new magic’
“Exercise is the new magic,” commented Mariann R. Piano, PhD, a professor at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and cochair of the session where Dr. Felker gave his report. “I love that the trial was pragmatic, randomized, and ran at six sites so the generalizability of the findings is really strong.” Dr. Piano also gave the study high marks for recruiting many African American patients, 47% of the study population, and its assessment of a patient-reported outcome, the KCCQ score.
Patients enrolled in TARGET-HF-DM averaged 59 years of age, about a third were women, and two-thirds had heart failure with a reduced ejection fraction of 40% or less. Eighty percent of participants had New York Heart Association class II functional limitations, and a third also had atrial fibrillation. Their average serum level of the N-terminal of the prohormone brain natriuretic peptide at baseline was 1,309 pg/mL. Most patients were on standard heart failure and diabetes medications, with 88% receiving an ACE inhibitor or angiotensin-receptor blocker (in some cases coupled with sacubitril), 90% were on a beta-blocker, 50% were on a mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist, 54% were on insulin, 47% were on a biguanidine, 25% were on a sulfonylurea, and 7% were on a sodium-glucose cotransporter inhibitor. About half the patients also had an implantable cardioverter defibrillator.
Dr. Felker acknowledged that the 313 average increment in steps per day among patients in the intervention group, compared with controls was modest, but it represented about a 10% increase from baseline among patients who in general had a very sedentary life. All patients had received at the start of the study guidelines from the American Heart Association on appropriate types and levels of physical activity for patients with heart failure and diabetes. The researcher previously published a description of the design and rationale of the study.
The study followed patients for an additional 3 months beyond the end of the intervention period, and the excess step count among people in the intervention arm persisted, although the between-group difference was no longer significant. The researchers also analyzed changes during the intervention phase in abnormal fatty acid metabolites among a subgroup of 110 patients and found that these levels tended to decline among those in the intervention group but not among the controls. These metabolites have been associated with disordered metabolism in patient with heart failure, so the observed reduced levels were consistent with the other outcomes. “The signals all went in the direction of reduced metabolic dysregulation,” said Dr. Felker.
Despite the positive outcomes of the intervention studied, Dr. Felker said that this type of approach needs further refinement and study before it’s ready for widespread use. “I think TARGET-HF-DM is another piece of the puzzle, but like all small trials it needs replication in larger trials before adoption into practice guidelines,” he added.
The study received no commercial funding. Dr. Felker has been a consultant to Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cytokinetics, Medtronic, Novartis, Reprieve, and Sequana, and he has received research funding from several companies. Dr. Piano had no disclosures.
A 3-month lifestyle intervention that used a step counter and regular, personalized text messages to encourage increased mobility and adherence to medications led to a substantial rise in the quality of life in a randomized controlled study with 187 U.S. patients with heart failure and diabetes.
The TARGET-HF-DM study supplied a wrist-worn step counting device to adults with any type of heart failure and any type of diabetes at six U.S. sites and collected data on daily step counts and medication adherence through smartphone-based apps. Researchers randomized the patients to an intervention of thrice-weekly text messages that gave them personalized feedback on their recent activity and adherence and updated activity and adherence goals, or to a control group that only received a once-weekly generic message to wear the step counter.
After 3 months, patients in the intervention arm had an average incremental gain of 313 steps per day from baseline, compared with the controls, a significant difference for the study’s primary endpoint, G. Michael Felker, MD, reported at the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America.
A ‘quite large’ increase in quality of life.
Perhaps more importantly, a secondary analysis assessed quality of life with the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) overall summary score, which showed after 3 months a 5.5-point average increased improvement among patients in the intervention arm, compared with controls. Score increases of 5 of more points on the KCCQ represent clinically meaningful changes.
This average, incremental KCCQ score improvement was “quite large relative to what we typically see in placebo-controlled trials of effective drugs,” said Dr. Felker, professor of medicine at Duke University, Durham, N.C., and director of cardiovascular research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. If a similar magnitude change in KCCQ was associated with a drug treatment “we would say it was an incredibly large signal in terms of quality of life, so I think the patients are telling us that [the intervention] is making a clinically important difference.”
But Dr. Felker cautioned that the study was not blinded, raising the possibility that the change in quality of life could have been partially explained by “patients feeling more engaged about doing something for their health.”
His report omitted data on the medication adherence facet of the study, which will come out in a subsequent report, raising the possibility that some of the quality of life benefit as well as the ability of patients to boost their step count was related to more consistent treatment with their prescribed medications, but Dr. Felker discounted this possibility.
“The adherence intervention was basically a digital tool that helped people better remember their medication regimen. While it is possible that this could have influenced the KCCQ data this seems quite unlikely to me,” he said in an interview.
‘Exercise is the new magic’
“Exercise is the new magic,” commented Mariann R. Piano, PhD, a professor at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and cochair of the session where Dr. Felker gave his report. “I love that the trial was pragmatic, randomized, and ran at six sites so the generalizability of the findings is really strong.” Dr. Piano also gave the study high marks for recruiting many African American patients, 47% of the study population, and its assessment of a patient-reported outcome, the KCCQ score.
Patients enrolled in TARGET-HF-DM averaged 59 years of age, about a third were women, and two-thirds had heart failure with a reduced ejection fraction of 40% or less. Eighty percent of participants had New York Heart Association class II functional limitations, and a third also had atrial fibrillation. Their average serum level of the N-terminal of the prohormone brain natriuretic peptide at baseline was 1,309 pg/mL. Most patients were on standard heart failure and diabetes medications, with 88% receiving an ACE inhibitor or angiotensin-receptor blocker (in some cases coupled with sacubitril), 90% were on a beta-blocker, 50% were on a mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist, 54% were on insulin, 47% were on a biguanidine, 25% were on a sulfonylurea, and 7% were on a sodium-glucose cotransporter inhibitor. About half the patients also had an implantable cardioverter defibrillator.
Dr. Felker acknowledged that the 313 average increment in steps per day among patients in the intervention group, compared with controls was modest, but it represented about a 10% increase from baseline among patients who in general had a very sedentary life. All patients had received at the start of the study guidelines from the American Heart Association on appropriate types and levels of physical activity for patients with heart failure and diabetes. The researcher previously published a description of the design and rationale of the study.
The study followed patients for an additional 3 months beyond the end of the intervention period, and the excess step count among people in the intervention arm persisted, although the between-group difference was no longer significant. The researchers also analyzed changes during the intervention phase in abnormal fatty acid metabolites among a subgroup of 110 patients and found that these levels tended to decline among those in the intervention group but not among the controls. These metabolites have been associated with disordered metabolism in patient with heart failure, so the observed reduced levels were consistent with the other outcomes. “The signals all went in the direction of reduced metabolic dysregulation,” said Dr. Felker.
Despite the positive outcomes of the intervention studied, Dr. Felker said that this type of approach needs further refinement and study before it’s ready for widespread use. “I think TARGET-HF-DM is another piece of the puzzle, but like all small trials it needs replication in larger trials before adoption into practice guidelines,” he added.
The study received no commercial funding. Dr. Felker has been a consultant to Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cytokinetics, Medtronic, Novartis, Reprieve, and Sequana, and he has received research funding from several companies. Dr. Piano had no disclosures.
A 3-month lifestyle intervention that used a step counter and regular, personalized text messages to encourage increased mobility and adherence to medications led to a substantial rise in the quality of life in a randomized controlled study with 187 U.S. patients with heart failure and diabetes.
The TARGET-HF-DM study supplied a wrist-worn step counting device to adults with any type of heart failure and any type of diabetes at six U.S. sites and collected data on daily step counts and medication adherence through smartphone-based apps. Researchers randomized the patients to an intervention of thrice-weekly text messages that gave them personalized feedback on their recent activity and adherence and updated activity and adherence goals, or to a control group that only received a once-weekly generic message to wear the step counter.
After 3 months, patients in the intervention arm had an average incremental gain of 313 steps per day from baseline, compared with the controls, a significant difference for the study’s primary endpoint, G. Michael Felker, MD, reported at the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America.
A ‘quite large’ increase in quality of life.
Perhaps more importantly, a secondary analysis assessed quality of life with the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) overall summary score, which showed after 3 months a 5.5-point average increased improvement among patients in the intervention arm, compared with controls. Score increases of 5 of more points on the KCCQ represent clinically meaningful changes.
This average, incremental KCCQ score improvement was “quite large relative to what we typically see in placebo-controlled trials of effective drugs,” said Dr. Felker, professor of medicine at Duke University, Durham, N.C., and director of cardiovascular research at the Duke Clinical Research Institute. If a similar magnitude change in KCCQ was associated with a drug treatment “we would say it was an incredibly large signal in terms of quality of life, so I think the patients are telling us that [the intervention] is making a clinically important difference.”
But Dr. Felker cautioned that the study was not blinded, raising the possibility that the change in quality of life could have been partially explained by “patients feeling more engaged about doing something for their health.”
His report omitted data on the medication adherence facet of the study, which will come out in a subsequent report, raising the possibility that some of the quality of life benefit as well as the ability of patients to boost their step count was related to more consistent treatment with their prescribed medications, but Dr. Felker discounted this possibility.
“The adherence intervention was basically a digital tool that helped people better remember their medication regimen. While it is possible that this could have influenced the KCCQ data this seems quite unlikely to me,” he said in an interview.
‘Exercise is the new magic’
“Exercise is the new magic,” commented Mariann R. Piano, PhD, a professor at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn., and cochair of the session where Dr. Felker gave his report. “I love that the trial was pragmatic, randomized, and ran at six sites so the generalizability of the findings is really strong.” Dr. Piano also gave the study high marks for recruiting many African American patients, 47% of the study population, and its assessment of a patient-reported outcome, the KCCQ score.
Patients enrolled in TARGET-HF-DM averaged 59 years of age, about a third were women, and two-thirds had heart failure with a reduced ejection fraction of 40% or less. Eighty percent of participants had New York Heart Association class II functional limitations, and a third also had atrial fibrillation. Their average serum level of the N-terminal of the prohormone brain natriuretic peptide at baseline was 1,309 pg/mL. Most patients were on standard heart failure and diabetes medications, with 88% receiving an ACE inhibitor or angiotensin-receptor blocker (in some cases coupled with sacubitril), 90% were on a beta-blocker, 50% were on a mineralocorticoid receptor antagonist, 54% were on insulin, 47% were on a biguanidine, 25% were on a sulfonylurea, and 7% were on a sodium-glucose cotransporter inhibitor. About half the patients also had an implantable cardioverter defibrillator.
Dr. Felker acknowledged that the 313 average increment in steps per day among patients in the intervention group, compared with controls was modest, but it represented about a 10% increase from baseline among patients who in general had a very sedentary life. All patients had received at the start of the study guidelines from the American Heart Association on appropriate types and levels of physical activity for patients with heart failure and diabetes. The researcher previously published a description of the design and rationale of the study.
The study followed patients for an additional 3 months beyond the end of the intervention period, and the excess step count among people in the intervention arm persisted, although the between-group difference was no longer significant. The researchers also analyzed changes during the intervention phase in abnormal fatty acid metabolites among a subgroup of 110 patients and found that these levels tended to decline among those in the intervention group but not among the controls. These metabolites have been associated with disordered metabolism in patient with heart failure, so the observed reduced levels were consistent with the other outcomes. “The signals all went in the direction of reduced metabolic dysregulation,” said Dr. Felker.
Despite the positive outcomes of the intervention studied, Dr. Felker said that this type of approach needs further refinement and study before it’s ready for widespread use. “I think TARGET-HF-DM is another piece of the puzzle, but like all small trials it needs replication in larger trials before adoption into practice guidelines,” he added.
The study received no commercial funding. Dr. Felker has been a consultant to Amgen, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Cytokinetics, Medtronic, Novartis, Reprieve, and Sequana, and he has received research funding from several companies. Dr. Piano had no disclosures.
FROM HFSA 2021
PRESERVED-HF: Dapagliflozin improves physical limitations in patients with HFpEF
The SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin scored a clear win in a randomized, controlled trial with more than 300 U.S. patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), showing a significant and clinically meaningful benefit for the primary endpoint, a KCCQ measure of symptoms and physical limitations, after 12 weeks of treatment.
These results in the PRESERVED-HF study follow closely on the heals of the initial report from the EMPEROR-Preserved trial that showed a benefit from a different sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor, empagliflozin (Jardiance) in nearly 6,000 randomized patients for the primary endpoint of preventing cardiovascular death or hospitalizations for heart failure.
In PRESERVED-HF, patients with HFpEF who received a standard, once-daily dose of dapagliflozin (Farxiga) had an average 5.8-point improvement in their condition as measured by the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire clinical summary score (KCCQ-CS), the study’s primary endpoint.
This is “the first study to demonstrate that an SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin significantly improves symptoms, physical limitations, and 6-minute walking distance in patients with HFpEF,” Mikhail N. Kosiborod, MD, reported at the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America. The secondary endpoint of 6-minute walking distance “has been very difficult to improve in many previous studies of other treatments” tested in patients with HFpEF, noted Dr. Kosiborod, a cardiologist and codirector of the Cardiometabolic Center of Excellence at Saint Luke’s Mid-America Heart Institute.
The results are “highly complementary” to the findings from large outcome trials, such as the findings from EMPEROR-Preserved, he said, and collectively the recent findings from these studies of SGLT2 inhibitors in patients with HFpEF identify drugs in this class as a “new treatment option” for patients with a disorder that until now had no treatment with unequivocally proven efficacy and safety.
‘Impressive and unprecedented’ findings
The findings are “really impressive and unprecedented,” said Milton Packer, MD, a cardiologist at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas who was not involved in the study. “This is the largest KCCQ benefit ever seen in either patients with HFpEF or in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction,” said Dr. Packer, one of the investigators who led the EMPEROR-Preserved trial.
PRESERVED-HF randomized 324 patients diagnosed with heart failure and with a left ventricular ejection fraction of 45% or higher at any of 26 U.S. centers, with 304 patients completing the planned final analysis after 12 weeks on treatment. Patients could be in New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional class II-IV, they had to have a baseline N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) level of at least 225 pg/mL (or higher if they also had atrial fibrillation), and they required at least one of three markers of established heart failure: recent hospitalization for heart failure or an urgent outpatient visit that required treatment with an IV diuretic, elevated filling pressure measured by left or right catheterization, or structural heart disease detected by echocardiography.
The average age of the enrolled patients was 70 years, and they had been diagnosed with heart failure for about 3 years; 57% were women, 30% were African American, and their median body mass index was 35 kg/m2. Roughly 42% had NYHA class III or IV disease, 56% had type 2 diabetes, their median estimated glomerular filtration rate was about 55 mL/min per 1.73m2, their median KCCQ-CS score at baseline was about 62, and their average 6-minute walk distance was 244 m.
These and other features of the enrolled population define a distinctly U.S. patient population, stressed Dr. Kosiborod, professor of medicine at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
“The patients we enrolled are the patients we see in U.S. clinical practice,” he said in an interview. Importantly, the patient profile of a median BMI of 35 kg/m2, a median KCCQ-CS score of 62 – “quite low,” noted Dr. Kosiborod – and having more than 40% of patients in NYHA functional class III defines a study population with a substantially greater burden of obesity, symptoms, and functional impairment compared with those enrolled in prior trials involving patients with HFpEF such as EMPEROR-Preserved.
Results complement findings from larger trials
PRESERVED-HF was an investigator-initiated study designed to inform clinical practice, not as a pivotal trial like EMPEROR-Preserved, which aims to gather evidence to support a new indication for regulatory approval. (On Sept. 9, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration granted empagliflozin “breakthrough therapy” status for treating HFpEF based on the EMPEROR-Preserved results, which will fast-track the agency’s decision on this indication.)
Dr. Kosiborod noted that he and his associates designed PRESERVED-HF with adequate patient numbers to power a statistically valid assessment of effect on KCCQ-CS score. While the new findings will not by themselves lead to a new indication for dapagliflozin to treat patients with HFpEF, they will potentially complement the pending results of another trial, DELIVER, by showing efficacy and safety in a uniquely U.S. patient population. DELIVER is a pivotal, global trial of dapagliflozin in more than 6,000 patients with HFpEF that’s on track to report findings in 2022.
Dr. Kosiborod also stressed that dapagliflozin has U.S.-approved indications for treating patients with type 2 diabetes, and for patients with chronic kidney disease, and that a majority of patients enrolled in PRESERVED-HF had one or both of these conditions. That makes the new findings especially compelling for patients with either type 2 diabetes or chronic kidney disease and HFpEF who are not already receiving an SGLT2 inhibitor.
Other findings that he reported showed a range of benefits consistent with the primary endpoint, including the KCCQ overall summary score, which also showed a significant 4.5-point average increase over placebo after 12 weeks. Analysis by the percentage of patients achieving at least a 5-point improvement in the KCCQ clinical summary score (the threshold for a clinically meaningful improvement) showed that about 45% of patients treated with dapagliflozin reached this mark compared with roughly 35% of patients in the placebo arm, indicating a number needed to treat of nine to have one additional patient achieve this threshold after 12 weeks. Average improvement in 6-minute walk distance was about 20 m with dapagliflozin compared with placebo.
No heterogeneity of effect by baseline ejection fraction.
Subgroup analyses showed no heterogeneity of response across 12 different ways of subdividing the study population, including age, sex, race, diabetes status, and BMI. The median left ventricular ejection fraction among enrolled patients was 60%, and the findings showed identical KCCQ improvements among patients with ejection fractions less than the median and those with an ejection fraction above the median.
This last finding was especially relevant because the EMPEROR-Preserved results showed a possible signal of heterogeneity by ejection fraction and an attenuated effect among patients with HFpEF and an ejection fraction above the 60%-65% range, although the certainty of this finding is currently controversial.
The impact of empagliflozin on KCCQ clinical summary score in EMPEROR-Preserved showed an average incremental improvement of 1.32 points compared with placebo, a significant difference, but more modest than the increment from dapagliflozin treatment seen in PRESERVED-HF. Dr. Kosiborod hypothesized that this difference might be mostly because of the different patient populations enrolled in the two studies.
Dr. Kosiborod noted that a report on the PRESERVED-HF results will soon appear in Nature Medicine.
PRESERVED-HF was funded by AstraZeneca, which markets dapagliflozin (Farxiga), but the trials’ design and conduct were independent of this funding source. Dr. Kosiborod has been a consultant to AstraZeneca and numerous other companies, and he has received research funding from AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim. Dr. Packer has had financial relationships with AstraZeneca and numerous other companies.
The SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin scored a clear win in a randomized, controlled trial with more than 300 U.S. patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), showing a significant and clinically meaningful benefit for the primary endpoint, a KCCQ measure of symptoms and physical limitations, after 12 weeks of treatment.
These results in the PRESERVED-HF study follow closely on the heals of the initial report from the EMPEROR-Preserved trial that showed a benefit from a different sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor, empagliflozin (Jardiance) in nearly 6,000 randomized patients for the primary endpoint of preventing cardiovascular death or hospitalizations for heart failure.
In PRESERVED-HF, patients with HFpEF who received a standard, once-daily dose of dapagliflozin (Farxiga) had an average 5.8-point improvement in their condition as measured by the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire clinical summary score (KCCQ-CS), the study’s primary endpoint.
This is “the first study to demonstrate that an SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin significantly improves symptoms, physical limitations, and 6-minute walking distance in patients with HFpEF,” Mikhail N. Kosiborod, MD, reported at the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America. The secondary endpoint of 6-minute walking distance “has been very difficult to improve in many previous studies of other treatments” tested in patients with HFpEF, noted Dr. Kosiborod, a cardiologist and codirector of the Cardiometabolic Center of Excellence at Saint Luke’s Mid-America Heart Institute.
The results are “highly complementary” to the findings from large outcome trials, such as the findings from EMPEROR-Preserved, he said, and collectively the recent findings from these studies of SGLT2 inhibitors in patients with HFpEF identify drugs in this class as a “new treatment option” for patients with a disorder that until now had no treatment with unequivocally proven efficacy and safety.
‘Impressive and unprecedented’ findings
The findings are “really impressive and unprecedented,” said Milton Packer, MD, a cardiologist at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas who was not involved in the study. “This is the largest KCCQ benefit ever seen in either patients with HFpEF or in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction,” said Dr. Packer, one of the investigators who led the EMPEROR-Preserved trial.
PRESERVED-HF randomized 324 patients diagnosed with heart failure and with a left ventricular ejection fraction of 45% or higher at any of 26 U.S. centers, with 304 patients completing the planned final analysis after 12 weeks on treatment. Patients could be in New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional class II-IV, they had to have a baseline N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) level of at least 225 pg/mL (or higher if they also had atrial fibrillation), and they required at least one of three markers of established heart failure: recent hospitalization for heart failure or an urgent outpatient visit that required treatment with an IV diuretic, elevated filling pressure measured by left or right catheterization, or structural heart disease detected by echocardiography.
The average age of the enrolled patients was 70 years, and they had been diagnosed with heart failure for about 3 years; 57% were women, 30% were African American, and their median body mass index was 35 kg/m2. Roughly 42% had NYHA class III or IV disease, 56% had type 2 diabetes, their median estimated glomerular filtration rate was about 55 mL/min per 1.73m2, their median KCCQ-CS score at baseline was about 62, and their average 6-minute walk distance was 244 m.
These and other features of the enrolled population define a distinctly U.S. patient population, stressed Dr. Kosiborod, professor of medicine at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
“The patients we enrolled are the patients we see in U.S. clinical practice,” he said in an interview. Importantly, the patient profile of a median BMI of 35 kg/m2, a median KCCQ-CS score of 62 – “quite low,” noted Dr. Kosiborod – and having more than 40% of patients in NYHA functional class III defines a study population with a substantially greater burden of obesity, symptoms, and functional impairment compared with those enrolled in prior trials involving patients with HFpEF such as EMPEROR-Preserved.
Results complement findings from larger trials
PRESERVED-HF was an investigator-initiated study designed to inform clinical practice, not as a pivotal trial like EMPEROR-Preserved, which aims to gather evidence to support a new indication for regulatory approval. (On Sept. 9, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration granted empagliflozin “breakthrough therapy” status for treating HFpEF based on the EMPEROR-Preserved results, which will fast-track the agency’s decision on this indication.)
Dr. Kosiborod noted that he and his associates designed PRESERVED-HF with adequate patient numbers to power a statistically valid assessment of effect on KCCQ-CS score. While the new findings will not by themselves lead to a new indication for dapagliflozin to treat patients with HFpEF, they will potentially complement the pending results of another trial, DELIVER, by showing efficacy and safety in a uniquely U.S. patient population. DELIVER is a pivotal, global trial of dapagliflozin in more than 6,000 patients with HFpEF that’s on track to report findings in 2022.
Dr. Kosiborod also stressed that dapagliflozin has U.S.-approved indications for treating patients with type 2 diabetes, and for patients with chronic kidney disease, and that a majority of patients enrolled in PRESERVED-HF had one or both of these conditions. That makes the new findings especially compelling for patients with either type 2 diabetes or chronic kidney disease and HFpEF who are not already receiving an SGLT2 inhibitor.
Other findings that he reported showed a range of benefits consistent with the primary endpoint, including the KCCQ overall summary score, which also showed a significant 4.5-point average increase over placebo after 12 weeks. Analysis by the percentage of patients achieving at least a 5-point improvement in the KCCQ clinical summary score (the threshold for a clinically meaningful improvement) showed that about 45% of patients treated with dapagliflozin reached this mark compared with roughly 35% of patients in the placebo arm, indicating a number needed to treat of nine to have one additional patient achieve this threshold after 12 weeks. Average improvement in 6-minute walk distance was about 20 m with dapagliflozin compared with placebo.
No heterogeneity of effect by baseline ejection fraction.
Subgroup analyses showed no heterogeneity of response across 12 different ways of subdividing the study population, including age, sex, race, diabetes status, and BMI. The median left ventricular ejection fraction among enrolled patients was 60%, and the findings showed identical KCCQ improvements among patients with ejection fractions less than the median and those with an ejection fraction above the median.
This last finding was especially relevant because the EMPEROR-Preserved results showed a possible signal of heterogeneity by ejection fraction and an attenuated effect among patients with HFpEF and an ejection fraction above the 60%-65% range, although the certainty of this finding is currently controversial.
The impact of empagliflozin on KCCQ clinical summary score in EMPEROR-Preserved showed an average incremental improvement of 1.32 points compared with placebo, a significant difference, but more modest than the increment from dapagliflozin treatment seen in PRESERVED-HF. Dr. Kosiborod hypothesized that this difference might be mostly because of the different patient populations enrolled in the two studies.
Dr. Kosiborod noted that a report on the PRESERVED-HF results will soon appear in Nature Medicine.
PRESERVED-HF was funded by AstraZeneca, which markets dapagliflozin (Farxiga), but the trials’ design and conduct were independent of this funding source. Dr. Kosiborod has been a consultant to AstraZeneca and numerous other companies, and he has received research funding from AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim. Dr. Packer has had financial relationships with AstraZeneca and numerous other companies.
The SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin scored a clear win in a randomized, controlled trial with more than 300 U.S. patients with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF), showing a significant and clinically meaningful benefit for the primary endpoint, a KCCQ measure of symptoms and physical limitations, after 12 weeks of treatment.
These results in the PRESERVED-HF study follow closely on the heals of the initial report from the EMPEROR-Preserved trial that showed a benefit from a different sodium-glucose cotransporter 2 (SGLT2) inhibitor, empagliflozin (Jardiance) in nearly 6,000 randomized patients for the primary endpoint of preventing cardiovascular death or hospitalizations for heart failure.
In PRESERVED-HF, patients with HFpEF who received a standard, once-daily dose of dapagliflozin (Farxiga) had an average 5.8-point improvement in their condition as measured by the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire clinical summary score (KCCQ-CS), the study’s primary endpoint.
This is “the first study to demonstrate that an SGLT2 inhibitor dapagliflozin significantly improves symptoms, physical limitations, and 6-minute walking distance in patients with HFpEF,” Mikhail N. Kosiborod, MD, reported at the annual scientific meeting of the Heart Failure Society of America. The secondary endpoint of 6-minute walking distance “has been very difficult to improve in many previous studies of other treatments” tested in patients with HFpEF, noted Dr. Kosiborod, a cardiologist and codirector of the Cardiometabolic Center of Excellence at Saint Luke’s Mid-America Heart Institute.
The results are “highly complementary” to the findings from large outcome trials, such as the findings from EMPEROR-Preserved, he said, and collectively the recent findings from these studies of SGLT2 inhibitors in patients with HFpEF identify drugs in this class as a “new treatment option” for patients with a disorder that until now had no treatment with unequivocally proven efficacy and safety.
‘Impressive and unprecedented’ findings
The findings are “really impressive and unprecedented,” said Milton Packer, MD, a cardiologist at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas who was not involved in the study. “This is the largest KCCQ benefit ever seen in either patients with HFpEF or in patients with heart failure with reduced ejection fraction,” said Dr. Packer, one of the investigators who led the EMPEROR-Preserved trial.
PRESERVED-HF randomized 324 patients diagnosed with heart failure and with a left ventricular ejection fraction of 45% or higher at any of 26 U.S. centers, with 304 patients completing the planned final analysis after 12 weeks on treatment. Patients could be in New York Heart Association (NYHA) functional class II-IV, they had to have a baseline N-terminal pro-brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) level of at least 225 pg/mL (or higher if they also had atrial fibrillation), and they required at least one of three markers of established heart failure: recent hospitalization for heart failure or an urgent outpatient visit that required treatment with an IV diuretic, elevated filling pressure measured by left or right catheterization, or structural heart disease detected by echocardiography.
The average age of the enrolled patients was 70 years, and they had been diagnosed with heart failure for about 3 years; 57% were women, 30% were African American, and their median body mass index was 35 kg/m2. Roughly 42% had NYHA class III or IV disease, 56% had type 2 diabetes, their median estimated glomerular filtration rate was about 55 mL/min per 1.73m2, their median KCCQ-CS score at baseline was about 62, and their average 6-minute walk distance was 244 m.
These and other features of the enrolled population define a distinctly U.S. patient population, stressed Dr. Kosiborod, professor of medicine at the University of Missouri–Kansas City.
“The patients we enrolled are the patients we see in U.S. clinical practice,” he said in an interview. Importantly, the patient profile of a median BMI of 35 kg/m2, a median KCCQ-CS score of 62 – “quite low,” noted Dr. Kosiborod – and having more than 40% of patients in NYHA functional class III defines a study population with a substantially greater burden of obesity, symptoms, and functional impairment compared with those enrolled in prior trials involving patients with HFpEF such as EMPEROR-Preserved.
Results complement findings from larger trials
PRESERVED-HF was an investigator-initiated study designed to inform clinical practice, not as a pivotal trial like EMPEROR-Preserved, which aims to gather evidence to support a new indication for regulatory approval. (On Sept. 9, 2021, the Food and Drug Administration granted empagliflozin “breakthrough therapy” status for treating HFpEF based on the EMPEROR-Preserved results, which will fast-track the agency’s decision on this indication.)
Dr. Kosiborod noted that he and his associates designed PRESERVED-HF with adequate patient numbers to power a statistically valid assessment of effect on KCCQ-CS score. While the new findings will not by themselves lead to a new indication for dapagliflozin to treat patients with HFpEF, they will potentially complement the pending results of another trial, DELIVER, by showing efficacy and safety in a uniquely U.S. patient population. DELIVER is a pivotal, global trial of dapagliflozin in more than 6,000 patients with HFpEF that’s on track to report findings in 2022.
Dr. Kosiborod also stressed that dapagliflozin has U.S.-approved indications for treating patients with type 2 diabetes, and for patients with chronic kidney disease, and that a majority of patients enrolled in PRESERVED-HF had one or both of these conditions. That makes the new findings especially compelling for patients with either type 2 diabetes or chronic kidney disease and HFpEF who are not already receiving an SGLT2 inhibitor.
Other findings that he reported showed a range of benefits consistent with the primary endpoint, including the KCCQ overall summary score, which also showed a significant 4.5-point average increase over placebo after 12 weeks. Analysis by the percentage of patients achieving at least a 5-point improvement in the KCCQ clinical summary score (the threshold for a clinically meaningful improvement) showed that about 45% of patients treated with dapagliflozin reached this mark compared with roughly 35% of patients in the placebo arm, indicating a number needed to treat of nine to have one additional patient achieve this threshold after 12 weeks. Average improvement in 6-minute walk distance was about 20 m with dapagliflozin compared with placebo.
No heterogeneity of effect by baseline ejection fraction.
Subgroup analyses showed no heterogeneity of response across 12 different ways of subdividing the study population, including age, sex, race, diabetes status, and BMI. The median left ventricular ejection fraction among enrolled patients was 60%, and the findings showed identical KCCQ improvements among patients with ejection fractions less than the median and those with an ejection fraction above the median.
This last finding was especially relevant because the EMPEROR-Preserved results showed a possible signal of heterogeneity by ejection fraction and an attenuated effect among patients with HFpEF and an ejection fraction above the 60%-65% range, although the certainty of this finding is currently controversial.
The impact of empagliflozin on KCCQ clinical summary score in EMPEROR-Preserved showed an average incremental improvement of 1.32 points compared with placebo, a significant difference, but more modest than the increment from dapagliflozin treatment seen in PRESERVED-HF. Dr. Kosiborod hypothesized that this difference might be mostly because of the different patient populations enrolled in the two studies.
Dr. Kosiborod noted that a report on the PRESERVED-HF results will soon appear in Nature Medicine.
PRESERVED-HF was funded by AstraZeneca, which markets dapagliflozin (Farxiga), but the trials’ design and conduct were independent of this funding source. Dr. Kosiborod has been a consultant to AstraZeneca and numerous other companies, and he has received research funding from AstraZeneca and Boehringer Ingelheim. Dr. Packer has had financial relationships with AstraZeneca and numerous other companies.
FROM HFSA 2021