Press Release

For Immediate Release
Contact: Tom Capezzuto
973 972-7273
E-mail:capezzta@umdnj.edu

At UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School
UMDNJ Researchers Find Pacemaker Implants Are a Risk Factor for Development of Death and Hospitalization From Heart Failure -Study Published in March Issue of American Journal of Cardiology

3/14/05—Researchers at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ) have found that patients who have pacemaker implants are at an increased risk for developing heart failure.

The finding is based on a study by a team of cardiologists at the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in New Brunswick who examined the medical records of more than 11,000 patients over a 33-month period to determine if patients who had pacemaker implants had a greater chance of suffering heart failure or death from heart failure.

"This is the first population-based study to describe an increased risk of adverse heart failure events in patients that did not have a prior clinical diagnosis of heart failure," said Dr. Ronald S. Freudenberger, director of the Department of Heart Failure and Transplant Cardiology at the UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and lead investigator. The study is published in the March issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.

"In reviewing the records, we observed a significant increase in heart failure related events, including hospitalization or death, as early as six months after pacemaker implantation,"said Dr. Freudenberger, who also is director of the heart transplant program at Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital."Total mortality, however, was lower overall in the group with pacemakers, as was the occurrence of renal disease, cancer, neurological dysfunction and death from respiratory disease."

The researchers followed 11,426 New Jersey-based patients, all older than 25, over a period of 33 months. Seventy-three percent of the patients were implanted with dual-chamber pacemaker devices and the remainder of the group had single-chamber pacemaker implants.

"We found that 20 percent of the patients experienced a new heart failure hospitalization event compared to 12.5 percent in the control group,"Dr. Freudenberger said."Deaths attributed to heart failure also were higher in the pacemaker group (81 to 53)."

Researchers from the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Md., also participated in this study.

--March 14, 2005