Drug shows no significant effect on mortality for seniors with reduced ejection fraction
TUESDAY, March 12 (HealthDay News) -- For older adults with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction, digoxin is associated with a significant reduction in 30-day all-cause hospital admission, with no significant effect on mortality, according to a study presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology, held March 9 to 11 in San Francisco.
Ali Ahmed, M.D., M.P.H., of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and colleagues examined the effect of digoxin on 30-day all-cause hospitalization in a cohort of 3,405 older ambulatory patients (aged 65 years or older) with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction.
The researchers found that digoxin correlated with a 2.7 percent absolute reduction in 30-day all-cause hospitalization, and with a significant reduction compared with placebo (hazard ratio, 0.66). Digoxin had no significant impact on 30-day all-cause mortality (hazard ratio, 0.55; P = 0.096).
"If we can replicate these results in hospitalized patients with acute heart failure and find that digoxin also reduced 30-day all-cause readmission rates as it did for 30-day all-cause admission, then it provides a very simple, low-cost tool to reduce this burden for the patients and for our health care system," Ahmed said in a statement.
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