Understanding the mechanisms of heart failure and personalizing heart failure treatment based on individual patient characteristics may represent a significant opportunity for improving quality for heart care and achieving cardiac readmissions reductions, according to two Viewpoint articles in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Heart failure mortality and complications vary according to race and ethnicity, according to research cited in one Viewpoint. The different ways heart failure affects varying ethnicities and genders warrant a move towards personalized heart failure treatment based on patient characteristics. The Viewpoint's authors suggest such treatment, while more complex than a standardized approach, has the potential to reduce readmissions and deaths related to heart failure with more reliability than current interventions.
According to another Viewpoint, this approach is still out of medicine's grasp until the mechanisms of heart failure are better understood. Generic heart failure prevention measures show little benefit; heart failure resources would be better appropriated toward continued progress in understanding the biological and environmental triggers of heart disease, according to the article.
Both Viewpoints stress the importance of understanding the individual factors contributing to heart failure and heart failure readmissions, rather than creating comprehensive interventions that may or may not be equipped to provide optimal solutions for any given patient.
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