Palliative Care in Heart Failure (PAL-HF)

Heart failure currently affects over 5 million Americans. Symptomatic patients have a median life expectancy of less than 5 years and those with late-stage disease have 1-year mortality rates approaching 90%. Despite recent therapeutic advances that reduce morbidity and mortality, heart failure continues to cause enormous suffering. Patients with advanced disease suffer not only from the physical effects of the illness, but also from psychosocial and spiritual distress. In addition, heart failure costs more than $34 billion annually to the healthcare system and a disproportionate amount is spent on patients in the last 6 months of life when some of the treatments may be either ineffective or undesired. Selected patients are candidates for aggressive treatments such as cardiac transplantation or mechanical circulatory support, but the application of these therapies to the broader heart failure population is limited by resource scarcity and their untested usefulness in older patients with significant co-morbidities.

The progressive nature of heart failure coupled with high mortality rates and poor quality of life mandates greater attention to palliative care as a routine component of heart failure management. Patients with advanced heart failure, particularly the elderly and those with significant co-morbidities, ought to be ideal candidates for palliative care that aims to relieve suffering and improve quality of life. Yet, several challenges have limited the use of palliative care approaches in heart failure:

1. Determination of Prognosis. Several validated multivariable models have been developed to predict survival, yet considerable uncertainty remains and physicians are frequently unsure whether they are caring for a patient near or far from the end of life. Patients have an even harder time and are typically overly optimistic about their survival relative to that observed or predicted by multivariable models.
2. Timing of Implementation. This prognostic uncertainty and the highly variable disease trajectories of individual patients with heart failure pose a challenge as to when palliative care interventions ought to be implemented. The most appropriate time to introduce palliative care concepts, particularly with regard to end-of-life planning, remains undefined and is linked to patient prognosis and preferences.
3. Untested Interventions. There is limited evidence from randomized controlled trials of palliative care interventions in heart failure and the majority focus on resuscitation preferences. Further, practice guidelines from major cardiovascular societies are limited on this subject.
4. Lack of Palliative Care Training of Cardiovascular Specialists . The education of cardiovascular specialists typically excludes formalized training in the principles and practice of palliative care.

Given these limitations, a properly designed and powered study is required to determine whether a multidimensional palliative care intervention in addition to usual care improves health-related outcomes relative to usual care alone in advanced heart failure patients with a highly probable short-term mortality.

PAL-HF is prospective, controlled, unblinded, 2-arm, single-center clinical trial of approximately 200 advanced heart failure patients with >50% predicted 6-month mortality randomized to usual, state of the art heart failure care or usual care combined with the PAL-HF intervention.