Intravenous nesiritide vs nitroglycerin for treatment of decompensated congestive heart failure: a randomized controlled trial

What Was Tested

Researchers studied BNP (Nesiritide) and ANP (Atrial Natriuretic Peptide) in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Decompensated congestive heart failure (CHF) is the leading hospital discharge diagnosis in patients older than 65 years.

Who Took Part

The age groups tagged for this paper are middle-aged adults, both men and women.

Randomized, double-blind trial of 489 inpatients with dyspnea at rest from decompensated CHF, including 246 who received pulmonary artery catheterization, that was conducted at 55 community and academic hospitals between October 1999 and July 2000.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Because people in this BNP (Nesiritide) study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the participants nor the staff measuring them knew who was on BNP (Nesiritide), so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

Some participants received a placebo instead of BNP (Nesiritide), giving a reference point.

Intravenous nesiritide (n = 204), intravenous nitroglycerin (n = 143), or placebo (n = 142) added to standard medications for 3 hours, followed by nesiritide (n = 278) or nitroglycerin (n = 216) added to standard medication for 24 hours.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Analysis of Variance, Atrial Natriuretic Factor, Cardiotonic Agents, Dyspnea, Heart Failure, Hemodynamics and Natriuretic Peptide, Brain.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of BNP (Nesiritide) and ANP (Atrial Natriuretic Peptide).

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 6 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2002 (JAMA), a journal based in United States.

More context: the BNP (Nesiritide) compound page and the ANP (Atrial Natriuretic Peptide) compound page.