Klaus Witte

My research interests include vitamin D in CHF, and I was the principal investigator of VINDICATE, the largest study of vitamin D supplementation in CHF patients funded by the Medical Research Council which showed a clinically important increase in LV function following one year of vitamin D and was published in JACC in 2016. I was also a co-investigator on the recently published REM-HF study (Eur Heart J) exploring remote monitoring in CHF patients, funded by a special programme grant from the British Heart Foundation. I am the only cardiologist in the UK to hold an NIHR (UK) clinician scientist award, in my case for the OPT-pace project which, with 1800 patients enrolled is the largest ever prospective study to collect information on the relationship between pacemakers and heart failure.

My work on the influence of heart rate on exercise capacity in heart failure, around the hypothesis, that exercise intolerance in heart failure is not the result of poor heart rate rise (chronotropic incompetence) took a step forward following a series of studies collated in a paper in JACC in 2016 accompanied by an editorial. I have subsequently described, using a reproducible non-invasive technique to measure the force-frequency relationship developed in Leeds, that patients with heart failure have a flat force frequency slope, and low peak contractility which occurs at a lower heart rate than in controls. This finding and a short-term randomised cross-over study describing the benefit on exercise capacity of programming pacemakers using patients’ own force-frequency relationship information were published in JACC-HF in September 2017. I currently supervise three independently-funded PhD students and one NIHR-funded post doctoral researcher.