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Circulation on the Run


Feb 11, 2019

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, Associate Editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore.

Dr Greg Hundley:             And I'm Dr Greg Hundley, director of the Pauley Heart Center from VCU Health in Richmond, Virginia.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Is income volatility a new cardiovascular risk factor? You have to stay tuned to hear all about that. But for now, join Greg and I over a nice little coffee chat, because we're picking up the journal right here and I'm going to tell you about our two top picks this week. Greg, you go.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Well my top picks, Carolyn, is really pertaining to senescence and senescent cardiomyocytes. Remember that? Senescence is a situation where there's a mismatch between energy demand and supply and so that facilitates the cells transitioning toward failure. They lose their ability to function. In other parts of the body, they lose their ability to divide.

                                                And these investigators assessed altered calcium transfer from sarcoplasmic reticulum to the mitochondria, because that's being casually linked to the pathophysiology of aging in heart failure. Because the advanced glycation end products or AGEs accumulate through life, the authors thought that maybe this intracellular glycation would be occurring in aged cardiomyocytes and their impact on the sarcoplasmic reticulum and mitochondria. So, their study, they investigated both mice and humans and the found that ryanodine receptor glycation was associated with more pronounced calcium leak in mice and also interfibrillar mitochondria directly exposed to sarcoplasmic calcium release from aging mice had increased calcium content, compared to those with younger ones.

                                                Now we're starting to implicate a mechanism by where senescence could be important in these mice. But of course, in Circulation in these wonderful basic science papers that we have, they also cover a translational human component. And what these group found is that there were higher levels of advanced glycation end products and reduced glyoxalase 1 activity present in left atrial appendages, from those patients that underwent surgery greater than 75-years-of-age, compared to individuals that were younger. And also, elderly patients exhibited hyper glycation and increased mitochondrial calcium content that was associated with reduced myocardial aerobic capacity due to less respiring mitochondria.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Wow Greg, that was a huge summary and how nice to link aging or senescence with AGE or advanced glycation end products. Seriously, that was new to me. Okay look, bring it home. What are the clinical implications?

Dr Greg Hundley:             What these investigators have done is now identified a previously unknown pathophysiological mechanism that may facilitate the transition from healthy, towards failing cardiomyocytes and the implication is that if you could disrupt that process, maybe you could halt the aging of cardiomyocytes. You got to be careful though I think with senescence, just as we know from the general literature. Senescence is a defense mechanism in cancer therapy, but it's a protagonist if you will, in aging. More to come in this field, but very exciting research.

                                                So Carolyn, tell me about your first paper.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Happily, Greg. I'm going to take us to the cath lab and talk about functional assessment of epicardial coronary artery disease. This paper from Dr Koo and colleagues of Seoul National University Hospital, is the first to validate the physiological relevance and prognostic implication of all available novel resting pressure derived indices of coronary stenosis. This includes indices like resting full cycle ratio or RFR and diastolic pressure ratio or DPR, and they compared this to instantaneous wave free ratio or IFR and fractional flow ratio or FFR.

                                                What they looked at was more than a thousand vessels in 435 patients and showed that all the resting ... Just the resting. Not hyperemic but resting pressure divide indices, closely correlated with each other and showed excellent agreement and the same discriminatory ability for no FFR. All the indices also showed a similar pattern of changes to different anatomical and hemodynamic stenosis severity, regardless of the target vessels and importantly showed similar diagnostic performance for myocardial ischemia, defined by gold standard PET derived CFR and hyperemic myocardial blood flow.

                                                And finally, they showed that all these indices showed significant association with the two year vessel oriented composite clinical outcomes.

Dr Greg Hundley:             So, do we still need to do adenosine infusions in the cath lab?

Dr Carolyn Lam:                That's exactly what they're trying to drive at, because the major advantage of these resting indices, for example RFR over IFR, is that IFR doesn't require identification of a specific landmark or a specific time point during diastole. They may be simpler to perform and this first study showing their physiologic relevance and prognostic implication may enhance adoption of invasive physiologic assessment in daily clinical practice, which we know is important and a clinical benefit.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Excellent. I tell you, it would sure save time if we could use indices like that.

                                                Let me tell you about my next paper. This is from Renato Lopes, from Duke University Medical Center, in Durham. Also, one of your affiliates. In all of our cardiovascular/metabolic clinical trials today, cardiovascular death is a very important outcome. But what happens when, in doing a study like that and you have an undetermined cause of death, the US Food & Drug Administration Guidance indicates that deaths due to undetermined causes should be rare in well-run clinical trials.

                                                And so what this group did is they looked at 127,049 enrolled participants from nine trials and they looked at how deaths were adjudicated. And across nine clinical cardiovascular trials, in different therapeutic areas, the proportions of deaths adjudicated as related to undetermined cause ranged from 7-to-22% and overall, had an average of 16%. Interestingly, in multi-variable analysis, death due to undetermined cause, was associated with the therapeutic area and the year of publication of the study, and then also several patient factors including: gender, age, the region of enrollment, and time from enrollment to death.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Gosh, this is so enlightening. Greg, having been on CECs and struggle with the adjudication, I really like this paper as well. But please, tell us all, why should we be concerned about this?

Dr Greg Hundley:             Great question, Carolyn. First we might think about, if you're reading a study, the proportion of deaths due to undetermined cause should really fall within this range. And have a mean of maybe 16%. Second, what if there are higher rates due to undetermined cause? Well, that may indicate there are issues with the trial quality. And then finally, researchers, whenever they're doing a study, should really report on the proportion of deaths where cause was unable to be determined.

                                                And there was a great editorialist, David Morrow, from Brigham and Women's Hospital, and really pointed out, you've got a couple factors here that lead to why there's undetermined cause of death. Maybe the documents are missing, or you're in a clinical situation where a subject lives alone, found dead, there's no autopsy. Uncertain duration. Sometimes there are limits on the study personnel; their ability to actually go out and acquire the data so that the team, like what you're on, can actually adjudicate the information. And a point that's made is really ... He used the word, doggedness, but with which he consistently worked toward and tried to get those medical records and pursue them, because that is very important.

                                                When we think, well what's the importance of a study like this? It's valuable to those that perform studies, because as we're working with our study coordinators, we need to make that information known to them. If we don't collect the exact cause of death in these important cardiovascular interventional studies, we may end up with an improper result. And also, for the investigative team. A really important study I think, providing guidance for the first time now about what we should expect in undetermined cause of death, when we're looking at cardiovascular trials.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                Indeed, and from talking about doing the trials to talking about a very important trial, I want to take you to The Partner 2 Trials and talk about the cost-effectiveness of Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement, or TAVR, compared to surgical aortic valve replacement, in patients at intermediate surgical risk.

                                                Now we already know that TAVR is cost-effective, although not cost-saving. But cost-effective compared to surgical aortic valve replacement in those at high surgical risk. But this paper refers to intermediate surgical risk. And the analysis is from Dr Cohen and colleagues from Saint Luke's Mid-America Heart Institute, and it's an analysis of the Partner 2A Randomized Trial and the SAPIEN 3 Intermediate Risk Registry.

                                                In summary, they found that TAVR was projected to lower total costs by $8,000.00 to $10,000.00. And to increase quality adjusted survival by 0.15 to 0.27 years, compared to surgical aortic valve replacement over a lifetime horizon.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Wow! Carolyn, I've got two questions for you. First of all, how does TAVR save those costs? And number two, was this true for everyone? Were there any caveats or special subgroups that this was really applied to?

Dr Carolyn Lam:                The cost savings in a TAVR cohort looked like they were driven by both a shorter length of stay during the index hospitalization, as well, as less resource utilization during follow-up. And that would be in the form of fewer hospital days, as well as fewer rehabilitation and skilled nursing facility days.

                                                As for the caveats, you see that the authors did acknowledge that the long-term durability of the valves involved like the SAPIEN XT and the SAPIEN 3 valves is still unknown, and so lifetime costs associated with TAVR, may be higher than we assumed, owing to the need of more frequent repeat valve procedures for example.

                                                Now if though, the long-term data demonstrate comparable late mortality with TAVR, and the surgical aortic valve replacement, these findings are really significant, because they suggest that TAVR may become the preferred treatment strategy for patient populations. Not only based on clinical outcomes, but even based on economic considerations.

Dr Greg Hundley:             It looks like that long-term information is going to be really critical here, so we'll look for more in this area.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                For sure. Wish we could keep chatting, but I think we need to move to the featured discussion.

Dr Greg Hundley:             And now to the very fun segment of our discussion this week at Circulation on the Run. This is Greg Hundley, from VCU Health. Director of The Pauley Heart Center. And today we have a fantastic paper from Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri from Miami, transitioning to Columbia University. And also, our Associate Editor, Dharam Kumbhani from the University of Texas, Southwestern.

                                                Today's paper, Adina is going to discuss is, Associations of Income Volatility with Incident Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality in a US Cohort. And what she's done is worked with the Coronary Artery Risk Development in Young Adult Study, we also know that as, CARDIA. And it's really a prospective cohort conducted in urban centers, in Birmingham, Alabama, Chicago, Illinois, Minneapolis, Minnesota, and Oakland, California. The goal here was to asses a block of individuals, younger, aged 23-35 years, identified in the time window of 1990-to-2005 and then followed subsequently to look at income volatility.

                                                Adina, we're so excited to have you here. And can you tell us a little bit more about your study.

Dr Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri: Sure, the motivation for the study is the fact that we know that income volatility is on the rise. And what I mean by, income volatility, is the sudden and unpredictable change in income. And in the health researcher, we actually do not know as much, what is the effect or the influence of income volatility on health outcomes, and it is really common, most of us do experience these sudden or unpredictable changes in income. Whether they're little dips or little jumps in income. So they are really common, and I think it's really important to try to understand what would be their effect on health outcomes.

                                                We were really interested in specifically understanding their effect on all-cause mortality and incidents of cardiovascular disease events, so we took advantage of an ongoing perspective cohort study. The cardio study that you just mentioned. And what is really nice about this study is they were really relatively young back in 1990 when we first had the measure of income. They were between ages 23-and-35. And they were followed for over 20-years, so we had repeatedly over 10-years, or 15-years, repeated measures of income. And then we were able then to look in the subsequent 10-years for incident events, cardiovascular events and all-cause mortality, and what is also interesting in this study is that these individuals, given that their age range, so that they are in the peak of their working years, which makes it even more interesting in terms of applicability and inference of those findings that we're making in this study.

                                                We looked at, as I said, income volatility and we defined it basically as what is the standard deviation of these percent changes in income that you experience between the different visits in the study, which were on average, five years apart. And once we defined that, then we looked at it with outcome and what we really found was that those who experienced high volatility had around a two-fold increased risk of cardiovascular disease, as well as all-cause mortality.

                                                We also looked at another measure of income volatility which is the number of income drops, so how many times you've dropped significantly, which we defined as a drop of more than 25%. And that is lower than your average income throughout the study period. And we found similar results.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Adina, what could be the cause of this? What do you think as an investigative group, is the mechanism behind this finding?

Dr Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri: There could be various mechanisms playing roles here. Stress is obviously one of the important mechanisms. If you think about the instability of income, that instability in income could result in daily stresses, maybe inability to pay for bills. Also, that resulting in inflammation in all the stress pathway.

                                                Also, you could think potentially having this instability could also maybe hinder access to care, maybe coping mechanisms related to stress could alter adherence to treatment. Whether maybe someone has to take daily medications, having those dips or changes, sudden changes in income, could alter your adherence to those medications and then subsequently influence your risk for cardiovascular disease.

                                                Also, you could think access to health insurance. The social support, though it's not very well evidenced, but maybe if you've had always stable income, or low income, you're more likely to have more resilience. However, when you have these unpredictable changes, or sudden changes in income, you may not have that coping mechanism or support ready for you to deal with those sudden changes.

                                                These are some of the pathways that we think of that could potentially be playing a key role here.

Dr Greg Hundley:             Very good. Now let's turn to Dharam, our Associate Editor, from University Texas, Southwestern. Dharam, boy, surprising findings. A young cohort. I mean, they were 23-to-35 and in the next 10-years of their life they start to experience hard cardiovascular events. I mean, fatal and non-fatal myocardial infarction, and also, all-cause mortality. How do you put this in perspective, related to the workforce, and what do you think this means for this young population moving forward?

Dr Dharam Kumbhani:   At the outset we obviously want to congratulate Adina and her group, for this really, very interesting study in cardiovascular EPY and broadly intersects in health economics and health policy, as well for obvious reasons.

                                                Very interesting construct as you pointed out and what does this mean for younger subjects who experience these income volatility very early in their life. I think, just like any other EPY study, I think the perspective is helpful, because although the hazard ratio for these income volatility is two or higher, the absolute incidents rates are, again putting that in perspective is important, and so the absolute incident rates for example is somewhere between two-to-five, per 1,000 persons. So overall that impact, that's just helpful to understand what effects this would have.

                                                Hopefully, that helps. But obviously, very interesting analysis and brings up a lot of questions. I think one thing I may add to what was just mentioned is ... And this was highlighted very nicely by the editorialist, Dr Spatz, and her colleague from Yale. About how this is globally in the financial toxicity space, and there are a number of these indicators that are now being carefully studied like in this study, such as wealth shock and as I said, financial toxicity. And how they actually have an impact on cardiovascular outcomes.

                                                One of the feelings when you read a paper like this or when you read studies like this, and in fact this was one of our initial concerns as well, is to what extent you may have a component, or significant component of reverse causality. Your, "Patients who are sicker in some way," or have those culpabilities, be the ones that have these events is their relationship with other socio-economic indicators such as employment and how that would affect income volatility as well.

                                                I think the authors have done a really terrific job responding to that. And again, it shows an association obviously we know that, that doesn't imply that it's cause[owed], but it's a very interesting association. And that it's helpful to speculate both on the mechanisms, which were just outlined, and also what this means from a health policy standpoint. What that would mean for researchers in the cardiology community, or policy makers, things like that. So I think this is a very nice analysis and definitely brings up a lot of discussion points.

Dr Greg Hundley:             And a very important paper on multiple fronts. One, we've identified an issue in young, healthy individuals that could significantly contribute to adverse cardiovascular events. And then number two, I really liked your point on how this could impact public health policy, and maybe even how we need to think about reducing stress and how we design aspects of the workforce moving forward, so individuals don't suffer from these conditions.

                                                I want to thank, Adina Zeki Al Hazzouri, from Columbia. And our Associate Editor, Dharam Kumbhani, for these excellent comments. We look forward to seeing you next week.

Dr Carolyn Lam:                This program is copyright, American Heart Association, 2019.