PROMINENT

Rationale:  prominent is focussed at setting up a dedicated doctoral training programme for 16 Early Stage Researchers (ESRs) at the University Medical Center Groningen (UMCG) and the University of Groningen (RUG) and aiming to improve personalized medicine in chronic disease management.

Objective: PROMINENT aims to select the best students to become trained researchers, who can perform high quality research.​ PROMINENT trains and educates in 4 main pillars from which we are involved in improving personalized medicine.

In our workpackage aim to investigate whether atrial fibrillation is a mechanism or a bystander in heart failure.

We aim to study whether 1) the pathophysiology and prognostic significance of AF depends on severity of risk factors; 2) atrial myopathy develops in association with and as marker of ventricular myopathy; 3) diabetes, hypertension and obesity play a pivotal role as risk factors for atrial and ventricular myopathy; and finally 4) personalized risk factor reduction reduces AF progression, atrial myopathy and severity of HFpEF.

Study design: A total of 200 patients will be included: 50 patients with early AF and early HFpEF; 50 with early AF and more progressive HFpEF; 50 patients without (a history of) AF and early HFpEF; and 50 patients without (a history of) AF and more progressive HFpEF. An implantable loop recorder is implanted to monitor AF burden and extensive phenotyping at baseline.