, based on results from a substudy of the COAPT trial.
Significant improvements seen at 1 month in the TMVr group had waned only slightly by the 2-year time point, reported lead author Suzanne V. Arnold, MD, of Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute and University of Missouri–Kansas City, who presented the findings at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology. The study was simultaneously published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
“Considering the previously reported benefits of TMVr on survival and heart failure hospitalization, these health status findings further support the device as a valuable treatment option for heart failure patients with severe secondary mitral regurgitation who remain symptomatic despite maximally-tolerated guideline-directed medical therapy,” Dr. Arnold and her colleagues concluded.
Primary findings from the COAPT (Cardiovascular Outcomes Assessment of the MitraClip Percutaneous Therapy for Heart Failure Patients with Functional Mitral Regurgitation) trial showed that TMVr reduced hospitalizations due to heart failure and all-cause mortality over 2 years, leading the Food and Drug Administration to grant an extended indication to MitraClip. With the present substudy, the investigators sought to learn more about impacts of TMVr on overall health.
“Beyond prolonging survival and reducing hospitalizations, improving patients’ health status (i.e., symptoms, functional status, quality of life) is a key treatment goal of TMVr,” the investigators wrote. “In fact, among older patients with comorbidities and high symptom burden, health status improvement may be of greater importance to patients than improved survival.”
To measure these outcomes, the investigators employed the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) and the SF-36 health status survey, which they administered to 302 patients in the TMVr group and 312 patients in the standard care group. The primary endpoint was the KCCQ overall summary score (KCCQ-OS), which ranges from 0 to 100, with higher scores indicating better health status.
Across all patients, the average baseline KCCQ-OS score was 52.4 ± 23.0. After 1 month, the average KCCQ-OS score rose 2.1 points in the standard care group, while the TMVr group saw a 16.9-point increase, most heavily through the questionnaire’s quality of life domain. These figures translate to a mean between-group difference of 15.9 points, a value that decreased only slightly after 2 years, to 12.8 points. Further suggesting that TMVr had beneficial and lasting effects, a significantly greater percentage of patients in the TMVr group than in the standard care group were alive with a moderately large health improvement after 2 years (36.4% vs 16.6%; P less than .001).
The study was funded by Abbott Vascular. Several of the investigators reported financial relationships with Abbott as well as Novartis, Bayer, V-wave, Corvia, and others.
SOURCE: Arnold et al. J Am Coll Cardiol. 2019 Mar 17.