P J Hauptman

..Even modest degrees of hyponatremia are associated with a poorer prognosis. Treatment options include fluid restriction and the vaptan class ("aquaretics") in select patients...

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..The actual magnitude of this benefit and the degree to which it mitigates overall administration costs requires further study...

..Failure to respond to the need for palliative care puts at risk the mandate to treat the patient with heart failure during the entire course of illness...

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..Recommendations on malignancy screening are provided as well as an outline of areas of ongoing uncertainty...

..Based on these findings, tolvaptan 30 mg was chosen as the comparator for placebo in a large phase 3 survival trial...

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..However, little is known about hospice referral practices when patients are admitted because of acute decompensated heart failure...

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..However, little is known about associated mortality and cost. Therefore, we sought to describe the impact of chronic infusions on resource use and survival...

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..However, there is a paucity of data published describing physician beliefs about heart failure management, especially in its advanced stages...

..However, little is known about the variability in and contributors to costs associated with HF hospitalizations. We examined the distribution of costs associated with a HF diagnosis in a large contemporary hospital database...

..We conclude that some patients with advanced heart failure can be offered oral beta-blocker therapy by bridging with a combination of intravenous inotrope and short-acting intravenous beta blocker...

..Outpatient care accounts for a significant proportion of total heart failure (HF) expenditures. This observation, plus an expanding list of treatment options, has led to the development of the disease-specific HF clinic...

..Our objective was to evaluate use of beta-blockers (BB) among patients with heart failure undergoing a cardiac device procedure...

..We sought to characterize age-specific practices and outcomes among patients with heart failure undergoing device implantation using a large nationally representative administrative database...

..The background, methods, and statistical approaches used in this trial are reviewed in this article...

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..Therefore, we evaluated the inhospital mortality and costs associated with patients with heart failure who received an implantable cardioverter defibrillator, cardiac resynchronization device, or device lead...

..The natural history of kidney function following orthotopic heart transplant is not well defined and long-term follow up studies are scant...

..A device was implanted in 44 recipients (38 with defibrillator alone), and 6 had an appropriate discharge during follow-up. There was an interest in establishing a registry to enable further study and analysis...

..Further analyses are required to delineate the reasons underlying these trends and the appropriateness of prescribing practices for both digoxin and its antidote...

..Biomarkers, such as cardiac troponin, have prognostic value in end-stage renal disease, but require further study to determine clinical applications in directing more expensive and invasive cardiac evaluation...

..Evaluation for ischemic heart disease (IHD) is a nonstandardized practice before kidney transplantation. We retrospectively studied pretransplant cardiac evaluation (CE) practices in a national sample of renal allograft recipients...

..The numbers of these patients is likely to increase in an era of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators. Intervention studies designed to evaluate and improve strategies that emphasize symptom control should target this group...

..Risk factor modification strategies should be applied to the non-ischemic DCM cohort, especially with continued improvements in survival rates in patients with heart failure...

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..The relationship of body mass index (BMI) with heart failure (HF) risk before and after kidney transplant is not well described...

..Despite attempts at palliative endoscopic argon coagulation, the patient expired soon after presentation...

..8 +/- 2.2 years from time of transplant. Periprocedural success was high, and there was a trend toward better outcomes in the group that underwent stent deployment compared with conventional balloon angioplasty...

..Important questions about the impact of sensitization on outcomes following heart transplantation may not be resolved until the measurement and management of sensitization becomes more uniform...

..Areas of uncertainty, such as the selection of dose and duration of therapy, current guidelines, and patterns of underuse of therapy with this important class of drugs are outlined and highlighted...

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..This study sought to assess the potential utility of impedance cardiography (ICG) in predicting clinical deterioration in ambulatory patients with heart failure (HF)...

..The causes of regional variation in underuse do not appear to be related to regional differences in patient or hospital characteristics, and therefore, require further study...

..These studies will form the conceptual framework for an intervention study designed to address, at physician and patient levels, the process of selection of care options for older heart failure patients near the end of life. ..