Now, keep up to date
with daily feeds of newly posted stories
about America's Seniors...click on the box
to the left
Study in
Humans shows prevalence of Anergia in those
with Failing Hearts
Data in Nine-Month Study May Lead to
Different Approach to Patients Suffering
from ‘Lack of Energy’
NEW YORK (March 2009) – With the help of a
non-invasive method of monitoring human
activity, doctors and researchers at
Columbia University Medical Center are
shedding new light on a syndrome affecting
nearly 40 percent of older adults with heart
failure: anergia.
Anergia, or lack of energy, is a newly
delineated, criterion-based geriatric
syndrome that is often overlooked or
dismissed by doctors and patients alike as
simply a natural tiredness associated with
"old age."
Whether anergia is a result of heart failure
or perhaps a potential underlying
contributing factor is not entirely clear.
However, one thing is certain, researchers
say: Fatigue has been shown to have
independent long-term prognostic
implications in patients with heart failure,
suggesting that fatigue needs to be
effectively evaluated not only because
symptom alleviation is a target for
treatment, but also because of the potential
for the treatment of fatigue to influence
the prognosis in patients with heart
failure.
Mathew Maurer, M.D., associate professor of
clinical medicine at Columbia University
Medical Center, is the senior author of the
study being published in the March 2009
edition of the Journal of Cardiac Failure.
As part of the nine-month prospective cohort
study, heart failure patients were provided
an actigraph – a device worn on the wrist
like a watch that was used to assess
physical activity, energy expenditures and
sleep by measuring and recording limb
movement.
Participants were instructed to wear it
continuously on their non-dominant wrist for
the nine months of the study.
At baseline and at every three months for a
total of four visits, each subject underwent
a targeted physical exam including review of
concomitant medications, co-morbid
diagnoses, measurement of heart failure
severity and distance walked during a
six-minute hall walk as well as other
mediating factors that might influence
activity levels.
An earlier study by Dr. Maurer and the
Stroud Center for the Studies of Quality of
Life at Columbia University showed that
anergia may stem from many conditions,
including heart and kidney dysfunction,
arthritis, lung disease, anemia and
depression.
In the current study, Dr. Maurer, together
with Susan Delisle, NP, and the Healthcare
Innovation and Technology Lab at Columbia
University, found significant discrepancies
between self-reported fatigue and actigraphy
readings, suggesting that these readings
provide complimentary and important
information about the link between heart
failure, sleep disorders and impairments in
health-related quality of life that may be
operative through anergia.
Encouraged by the results, Maurer and his
team have applied for a $2 million NIH grant
to gather more data to further study the
origins and challenges of treating anergia.
"The overall goal of our current research
efforts is to develop methods to evaluate
and assess the causal or contributing
factors of anergia in order to develop
interventions to decrease morbidity and
mortality due to this syndrome," Dr. Maurer
says.
... ..
...
...