Decompensated heart failure: is there a role for the outpatient use of nesiritide?

Heart failure (HF) management has seen enormous advances in the past two decades, including publication of HF management guidelines targeted at further reduction of morbidity and mortality. Nonetheless, the morbidity of HF has steadily increased and now represents one of the largest health care expenditures in this country. Because hospitalization for HF is most likely for patients with more advanced HF, they share a disproportionate burden of the hospitalization costs and will require treatment regimens beyond the current guidelines, if this burden is to be alleviated. In June 2004, a group of investigators who helped establish the natriuretic peptide treatment paradigm, met to discuss the potential role of nesiritide as an outpatient treatment option for patients with symptomatic HF who were at high risk for repeated admissions, a syndrome now described as "chronic decompensated HF." This report presents their considerations on the contribution of natriuretic peptide physiology to the amelioration of progressive left ventricular dysfunction, the therapeutic use of B-type natriuretic peptide, and its potential application to the outpatient management of acute and chronic decompensated HF. The use of outpatient IV nesiritide was considered a promising treatment option for symptomatic chronic decompensated HF patients that merits further investigation. Such an approach, once validated, should be integrated into an evidence-based HF disease management program.