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The authors’ reply

Departement Innere Medizin, Universitätsspital Basel, Basel, Switzerland

Correspondence to:
Dr C Mueller, Departement Innere Medizin, Universitätsspital Basel, Petersgraben 4, CH-4031 Basel, Switzerland; chmueller@uhbs.ch

The first 100% of the full text of this article appears below.

We thank Dr Grigioni and colleagues for their thoughtful comments. We fully agree with them that our study provides only indirect evidence that prolonged QRS duration might be helpful in tailoring treatment during acute heart failure. We also agree with their statement that QRS duration may change during the course of disease. However, we consider hospitalisation for acute heart failure to be a unique opportunity to examine both, patient management and outcome. Again, we fully agree with Dr Grigioni and colleagues that the hypothesis that changes in management performed according to the detection of prolonged QRS duration would have an impact on patient outcome, needs to be tested in appropriate intervention studies.¹

As the ECG was not routinely repeated at hospital discharge in our patients, we cannot determine the association between QRS duration at discharge and long-term outcome in this dataset.

1. Breidthardt T, Christ M, Matti M, et al. QRS and QTc interval prolongation in the prediction of long-term mortality of patients with acute destabilised heart failure. Heart 2007; 93: 1093–7.[Abstract/Free Full Text]