Personalized treatment of heart failure with biomarker guidance using a novel disease severity score

Abstract

We propose a novel Myocardial Injury Summary Score (MISS) integrating the 4 biomarkers suggested by the 2013 American College of Cardiology/ American Heart Association guidelines for management of heart failure. In this case series, we examined 4 heart failure patients who received treatment guided by the biomarker results and 4 patients who received routine clinical management with no information about the biomarkers. Most of the patients receiving biomarker-guided management had medications adjusted based on the biomarker values, while no changes were recommended for patients in the biomarker-blinded category. This case series suggests that biomarker-guided therapy with serial biomarker values leads to timely therapeutic adjustment and that biomarker values as a composite score can be used effectively to measure the severity of heart failure.