Dr Greg Hundley: Welcome listeners. This is Dr Greg Hundley from the VCU Pauley Heart Center in Richmond, who is in the second of his two-week stint without his dear friend, Dr Carolyn Lam who will be returning in a week or two. Our feature article this week is from Dr Mikhail Kosiborod from Saint Luke's Mid America Heart Institute and the Georgia Institute for Global Health, and University of New South Wales. And we'll review the effects of dapagliflozin on quality of life and other metrics in patients with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction. But first, let's have a look at the other articles in this issue and just like last week we've got four other original manuscripts. The first two are sort of clinically related and that very first article comes from Dr Ben Levine from University of Texas Southwestern and he serves as the corresponding author and he's examining future predictors of the development of heart failure and preserved ejection fraction or HFpEF. His team tested the hypothesis as to whether patients with LVH and elevated cardiac biomarkers would demonstrate elevated LV myocardial stiffness when compared to healthy controls as a key marker for future HFpEF. The team recruited 46 patients with LVH. The LV septum was greater than 11 millimeters and elevated cardiac biomarkers, so the NTproBNP was greater than 40 or the cardiac troponin T was greater than 0.6. And they were recruited along with 61 age and sex-matched cohort of healthy controls. To define LV pressure volume relationships, right heart catheterization and 3D echocardiography were performed while preload was manipulated using lower body negative pressure and rapid saline infusion. They found that the left ventricle was less distensible in the LVH patients relative to the controls, that is they had a smaller volume for the same filling pressure. When preload was expressed as transmural filling pressure or wedge pressure minus right atrial pressure left ventricular myocardial stiffness was nearly 30% greater in the LVH group compared to the controls. The author's note that although LV myocardial stiffness of LVH patients was greater than that of the healthy controls at this relatively early stage, further studies are required to clarify whether interventions such as exercise training to improve LV compliance may prevent the full manifestation of the HFpEF syndrome in these high-risk individuals. Well, the second paper comes from Professor John McMurry of the British Heart Foundation Cardiovascular Research Center at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom. And the paper is somewhat similar to our feature article because it emanates from the DAPA Heart Failure dataset that we will hear about later. So in this paper, the authors examined the effects of Dapagliflozin according to age, given potential concerns about the efficacy and safety of therapies in the elderly in the prior trial. A clinical trial that as we know, demonstrated that a reduced risk of mortality and heart failure hospitalizations occurred in patients with HFrEF. So in this current study, a total of 4,744 patients that were 22 to 94 years of age were randomized. 636 were less than 55 years of age, 1,242 we're 55 to 64 years of age 1,717 were 65 to 74, and finally 1,149 were greater than 75 years of age. Consistent benefits were observed for the components of the primary outcome of all-cause mortality and symptoms across all the age groups. Although the adverse events and the study drug discontinuation increased with age, neither was significantly more common with Dapagliflozin across any of the age groups. There was no significant imbalance and tolerability or safety events between Dapagliflozin and placebo, even in the very old population group. So we'll have more to discuss later in the feature discussion with a second paper that really looks also at the DAPA-HF study. The next original article comes from our world of Basic Science and it reports that the deficiency of cir