Serelaxin in addition to standard therapy in acute heart failure: rationale and design of the RELAX-AHF-2 study

What Was Tested

The paper reports a study of Relaxin (Serelaxin), published as a randomized controlled trial.

Patients admitted for acute heart failure (AHF) experience high rates of in-hospital and post-discharge morbidity and mortality despite current therapies.

Serelaxin is recombinant human relaxin-2, a hormone with vasodilatory and end-organ protective effects believed to play a central role in the cardiovascular and renal adaptations of human pregnancy.

Who Took Part

The abstract describes 5 patients taking part.

PubMed indexes the participants as older adults, both men and women.

How the Study Was Run

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

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

Blinding on both sides kept the patients and researchers unaware of who received Relaxin (Serelaxin).

Some patients received a placebo instead of Relaxin (Serelaxin), giving a reference point.

Running at several centres spread the Relaxin (Serelaxin) study over different clinics and patient groups.

What Was Measured

RELAX-AHF-2 ( ClinicalTrials.gov NCT01870778) is designed to confirm serelaxin's effect on these clinical outcomes.

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Acute Disease, Cause of Death, Europe, Heart Failure, Incidence, Recombinant Proteins and Relaxin.

The authors tagged it with the keywords Acute heart failure, Mortality, Phase 3 trial, Serelaxin and Worsening heart failure.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Relaxin (Serelaxin) in 5 patients.

With fewer than 40 people, it is a small study, so it is better read as an early signal for further research than as a settled answer.

The publication is from 2017 (European journal of heart failure), a journal based in England.

More context: the Relaxin (Serelaxin) compound page, all human trials.