The Baltimore Study of Aging provides insights into cardiovascular changes in healthy elderly persons and questions the long-term need for digitalis in compensated heart failure.
Questions digitalis continuation in compensated HF; leaves open whether deprescribing is safe without prospective trials.
While a muscular 52-year-old man walks briskly on the treadmill, Jerome L. Fleg, MD, staff cardiologist at the Gerontology Research Center, checks the oxygen consumption tank. Then, after taking the patient's blood pressure, he says: "We'll be doing five treadmill tests this morning, using a modified Balke protocol." The cardiovascular response to treadmill exercise is one of scores of tests that subjects in the Baltimore Study of Aging undergo every two years. From such studies has come a better understanding of what changes occur—and what things remain unchanged— as the heart grows older. This work has helped reshape the understanding of the cardiovascular system in healthy elderly persons. One question that the center's cardiovascular section asked several years ago is whether elderly patients taking digitalis long term really needed the drug. Upon reviewing the literature, Fleg found that "the efficacy of digitalis in compensated congestive heart failure for persons who
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Donald E. Riesenberg (1986) studied this question.
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