ECOST Trial Reveals BIOTRONIK Home Monitoring Improves Battery Life for ICD Patients

BIOTRONIK announced the results of the ECOST randomised controlled trial. BIOTRONIK is a producer of implantable cardiac devices for remote monitoring.

The ECOST trial showed for the first time that using the Home Monitoring system from BIOTRONIK, enabled minimization of sudden shocks and caused an increase in the battery life for patients with an implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD). The results of the trial were announced at the ESC Congress 2011 held at France on the 29th of August.

ECOST is a clinical trial conducted across multiple centers which determined the efficiency and safety of the BIOTRONIK Home Monitoring system in remote monitoring of ICD patients. As many as 433 patients were analysed in the trial that lasted for 27 months by assigning them to normal in-office care or the Home Monitoring follow-up.. The study group of patients were scheduled for in-office follow up at intervals of one year. In between these yearly follow ups any patient related event notifications could lead to interim follow ups. The results of the trial declare that the BIOTRONIK Home Monitoring system is a safe standard for office follow up and that it showed consistency with previous findings obtained from the landmark TRUST trial and the COMPAS trial. The unique finding of the ECOST trial are that there was a 52% reduction in the number of patients with sudden shocks and 72% reduction in the risk of hospitalizations that occurred due to sudden shocks. Professor Salem Kacet, the main investigator of the trial, pointed out that this was the first trial that demonstrated the Home Monitoring systems ability to reduce delivered and charged shocks generally and inappropriate shocks specifically. He added that the monitoring system was advantageous in the surveillance of arrhythmias and early implantation of ICD therapy.