B-type natriuretic peptide for acute dyspnea in patients with kidney disease: insights from a randomized comparison

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of BNP (Nesiritide), published as a randomized controlled trial.

B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) levels are reliably elevated in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) and therefore helpful in its diagnosis.

However, kidney disease results in elevated BNP levels independently of CHF.

Who Took Part

The study group was 452 patients.

PubMed indexes the participants as middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

A total of 452 consecutive patients (240 with kidney disease and 212 without kidney disease) were randomly assigned to a diagnostic strategy with (BNP group) or without (control group) the use of BNP levels provided by a rapid bedside assay.

How the Study Was Run

In design terms this was a randomized study.

Random assignment meant chance, not the researchers, decided who got BNP (Nesiritide) and who got the comparison, which limits bias.

What Was Measured

B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) levels are reliably elevated in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) and therefore helpful in its diagnosis.

However, kidney disease results in elevated BNP levels independently of CHF.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acute Disease, Dyspnea, Glomerular Filtration Rate, Heart Failure, Kidney Diseases and Natriuretic Peptide, Brain.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized study of BNP (Nesiritide) in 452 patients.

With several hundred people or more, it is a fairly large study for this kind of research.

Its findings take up roughly 4 sentences of the abstract and are left out here on purpose; the source paper is the place to read them.

The publication is from 2005 (Kidney international), a journal based in United States.

More context: the BNP (Nesiritide) compound page, all human trials.