Response to Letter Regarding Article, “Impact of Implantable Cardioverter-Defibrillator, Amiodarone, and Placebo on the Mode of Death in Stable Patients With Heart Failure: Analysis From the Sudden Cardiac Death in Heart Failure Trial”

Abstract

We appreciate the useful insights contributed by the authors of the Letter to the Editor. Although the published article from the Sudden Cardiac Death in Heart Failure Trial (SCD-HeFT) investigators1 did not view the data from the perspective of evaluating the different modes of death given that a death occurred (as did the authors of the letter), we appreciate that this approach provides a different perspective of the data. We simply note that if one considers the percent of deaths attributable to heart failure among the patients who died in each arm, this percentage would be higher in the implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) arm (even if the numbers of heart failure deaths in each arm were identical) simply because the total number of deaths in the ICD arm is reduced compared with the other arms. That is, the …