What is the issue for NSW?
Heart failure is a leading cause of hospitalisation in NSW, responsible for at least 120,000 hospitalisation days annually, substantially reduced quality of life, and dramatically increased risk of mortality. Almost half of all people with heart failure have chronic kidney disease). This is a major problem because chronic kidney disease has the biggest impact on heart failure readmissions and mortality of all long-term health conditions.
Heart failure trials have not assessed chronic kidney disease progression in a standardised manner because there is uncertainty about how to best measure the progression of the disease. Resolving this uncertainty will allow future heart failure trials to assess the effects of treatment on heart failure and chronic kidney disease progression simultaneously, which would substantially increase the efficiency of clinical trials.
This research has the potential to dramatically accelerate identification of treatments that can improve outcomes for both heart failure and kidney disease for people living in NSW and globally.
What does the research aim to do and how?
This research project will analyse data from over 50,000 patients enrolled in 12 landmark heart failure trials to better understand how treatment effects on kidney function decline relate to treatment effects on kidney failure. The findings will help identify the most accurate way to assess kidney disease progression in heart failure trials. These results will therefore enable future trials to evaluate effects of new treatments on both conditions simultaneously.