Novel concept to guide systolic heart failure medication by repeated biomarker testing-results from TIME-CHF in context of predictive, preventive, and personalized medicine.

Background: It is uncertain whether repeated measurements of a multi-target biomarker panel may help to personalize medical heart failure (HF) therapy to improve outcome in chronic HF.

Methods: This analysis included 499 patients from the Trial of Intensified versus standard Medical therapy in Elderly patients with Congestive Heart Failure (TIME-CHF), aged ≥ 60 years, LVEF ≤ 45%, and NYHA ≥ II, who had repeated clinical visits within 19 months follow-up. The interaction between repeated measurements of biomarkers and treatment effects of loop diuretics, spironolactone, β-blockers, and renin-angiotensin system (RAS) inhibitors on risk of HF hospitalization or death was investigated in a hypothesis-generating analysis. Generalized estimating equation (GEE) models were used to account for the correlation between recurrences of events in a patient.

Results: One hundred patients (20%) had just one event (HF hospitalization or death) and 87 (17.4%) had at least two events. Loop diuretic up-titration had a beneficial effect for patients with high interleukin-6 (IL6) or high high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP) (interaction, P  = 0.013 and P  = 0.001), whereas the opposite was the case with low hsCRP (interaction, P  = 0.013). Higher dosage of loop diuretics was associated with poor outcome in patients with high blood urea nitrogen (BUN) or prealbumin (interaction, P  = 0.006 and P  = 0.001), but not in those with low levels of these biomarkers. Spironolactone up-titration was associated with lower risk of HF hospitalization or death in patients with high cystatin C (CysC) (interaction, P  = 0.021). β-Blockers up-titration might have a beneficial effect in patients with low soluble fms-like tyrosine kinase-1 (sFlt) (interaction, P  = 0.021). No treatment biomarker interactions were found for RAS inhibition.

Conclusion: The data of this post hoc analysis suggest that decision-making using repeated biomarker measurements may be very promising in bringing treatment of heart failure to a new level in the context of predictive, preventive, and personalized medicine. Clearly, prospective testing is needed before this novel concept can be adopted.

Clinical trial registration: isrctn.org, identifier: ISRCTN43596477.