Remote Pacemaker Monitoring More Effective Than Standard

MONDAY, Nov. 23 (HealthDay News) -- Remote pacemaker monitoring is more effective than traditional transtelephonic monitoring (TTM), detecting clinical events more quickly and frequently, according to a study in the Nov. 24 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

George H. Crossley, M.D., of the University of Tennessee College of Medicine in Nashville, and colleagues randomly assigned 897 patients with pacemakers to remote pacemaker interrogation (602 patients) or TTM and routine in-person evaluation (295 patients).

The researchers found an earlier mean time to first diagnosis of clinically actionable events in the remote monitoring group (5.7 versus 7.7 months). Only two percent of the 190 events in the TTM group were detected compared with 66 percent of 676 events in the remote monitoring group.

"These findings support the impression that the primary benefit afforded by TTM is the close evaluation of generator longevity, which, given advances in technology and automaticity, assumes importance predominantly as the device nears its elective replacement indictor," the author of an accompanying editorial writes. "In contrast, remote monitoring allowed the transmission of a host of details, both past and present, regarding pacemaker function and arrhythmias not retrievable through conventional TTM."

The study was supported by Medtronic. Two authors are employees of Medtronic, and several other authors reported financial and consulting relationships with Medtronic and Boston Scientific.

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