Cardiac resynchronisation therapy: how it works

Flow versus pressure effects of biventricular pacing: development and testing of open-access cross-modality tools for haemodynamic optimization and response quantification, and their application to testing the resynchronization hypothesis

Cardiac resynchronisation therapy (CRT) involves the implantation of a pacemaker device and is performed in certain heart failure patients to ensure the heartbeat maintains its rhythm. CRT has revolutionised treatment of some forms of heart failure– patients live longer and feel better - but scientists do not fully understand how, and we have no reliable way of measuring if CRT is working optimally in a patient. BHF Senior Clinical Research Fellow Professor Darrel Francis from Imperial College London has received a grant to work out how CRT influences blood pressure and blood flow, by carrying out state-of-the-art experiments. Better understanding of CRT should allow development of a reliable and practical method for measuring the response to CRT in a patient. It will also allow improved selection of patients for CRT and further technological improvement.