Which patients with congestive heart failure may benefit from biventricular pacing?

Background: Biventricular pacing improves the clinical status and ventricular function in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) and intraventricular conduction delay. However, patient selection criteria including NYHA functional class, rhythm, PR interval, QRS duration (QRSd), left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF), left ventricular diastolic diameter (LVDD), and other variables are not clearly defined.

Objective: To determine which and how many patients referred for an initial cardiac transplantation evaluation may be eligible for biventricular pacing (BP) according to the criteria of recently completed trials of cardiac resynchronization therapy (CRT).