Renal Denervation for Uncontrolled Hypertension: Complexity After Symplicity

Is There a Fundamental Law of Health and Disease?

Thursday

Friday

Renal denervation for uncontrolled hypertension demonstrated in many early trials to be extremely successful. These trials accounted for widespread implementation of the procedure in Europe and a change in the ESC management guidelines. The large, randomized, pivotal US trial, Symplicity HTN 3, unfortunately showed no benefit in comparison to optimal medical therapy.  These results bridaled enthusiasm for this technology and accounted for many companies to desert the premise altogether. Fortunately, those who believe in the procedure are pressing forward and multiple new trials which are currently enrolling will ultimately determine the future of renal denervation.  In the lecture, he will discuss the mechanism of action of renal denervation and early trial data for the Symplicity HTN 3. He will also give insight for new studies and data as well as alternative options besides RF ablation. 

In recent years, technologies enable us to collect overwhelming amount of signals about our patients. As a result, it becomes possible to quantify health and disease of human body from an integrative system viewpoint. However, conventional biomedical research tools that have been developed with reductionist theory may not be appropriate, mainly because these tools typically focus on individual components of the whole system, while ignoring important nonlinear interactions among different components of the system. In this talk, I will discuss a general framework to study physiologic dynamics. With this framework, we can derive useful measures that best reflect the emergent properties of the integrative systems, and to identify system-level properties that are critical to our understanding of a healthy system and its pathological perturbations. This new approach has a wide range of biomedical applications that will also be discussed in this talk.