Sudden cardiac death in patients with chronic heart failure: Rule of thumb in prediction studies

Excerpt

We were interested to read the paper by Yamamoto and colleagues published in May 2017 issue of the Journal of Nuclear Cardiology.1 The purpose of the authors was to investigate whether the regional washout rate (WR) in SPECT imaging provides additional prognostic value to global WR on planar images for the prediction of sudden cardiac death (SCD) in patients with chronic heart failure (CHF). They studied 73 CHF outpatients, and the regional WR was measured in 17 segments on the polar map. Authors reported that based on log-rank test, patients with both abnormal global WR and abnormal regional WR had a significantly higher rate of SCD than those with either abnormal global WR or abnormal regional WR or than patients with none of these criteria (P < 0.0001, 45% vs 15% vs 9%, respectively). Multivariate cox regression showed that the abnormal regional WR and abnormal global WR on planar images were significantly and independently associated with SCD. Also, they concluded that the analysis of regional MIBG WR on SPECT imaging provides additional prognostic value to global WR on planar images for SCD prediction in CHF patients.1 …