Current Heart Failure Reports

, Volume 10, Issue 3, pp 198–203 | Cite as

Relaxin for Treatment of Acute Heart Failure: Making the Case for Treating Targeted Patient Profiles

  • Jaime A. Hernandez-Montfort
  • Sonali Arora
  • Mara T. Slawsky
Decompensated Heart Failure (MM Givertz, Section Editor)
First Online:

Abstract

Patients presenting with acute heart failure (AHF) represent a heterogeneous population with respect to demographics, clinical profiles, and precipitating factors. Despite this, most clinical trials have treated the study population as a homogeneous group in an attempt to achieve adequate statistical power for endpoint analysis. This approach has proven to be of little value in the development of new agents for treatment of AHF. By contrast, the phase III clinical trial of relaxin focused on a subset of AHF patients who were normotensive or hypertensive and who had moderate renal impairment. The study patients, who were primarily from Eastern Europe, represented a population that would be expected to have less genetic variability than the study populations in larger multinational AHF trials. A focused study design targeting specific patient profiles should be considered for future clinical AHF trials that investigate new therapies or compare the effectiveness of existing therapies.

Keywords

Relaxin Acute heart failure Clinical trials Vasodilator Blood pressure 
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Notes

Compliance with Ethics Guidelines

Conflict of Interest

Jaime A. Hernandez-Montfort declares that he has no conflict of interest.

Sonali Arora declares that she has no conflict of interest.

Mara T. Slawsky has received compensation from St. Jude Medical for service as a consultant.

Human and Animal Rights and Informed Consent

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

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Copyright information

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Authors and Affiliations

  • Jaime A. Hernandez-Montfort
    • 1
  • Sonali Arora
    • 1
  • Mara T. Slawsky
    • 1
  1. 1.Cardiology, Baystate Medical CenterTufts University School of MedicineSpringfieldUSA

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