Position: Senior Lecturer and Consultant Cardiologist
Location: Leeds, UK

Klaus Witte is a Senior Lecturer and Consultant Cardiologist in the Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine at the University of Leeds. His group focuses on exercise intolerance in heart failure, its origins in the skeletal muscles and how this might be alleviated with devices.

He has long questioned standard teaching around heart rate and exercise capacity in heart failure (JACC 2016). His group described a reproducible non-invasive technique to measure contractility and plot the force-frequency relationship. Peak contractility in heart failure occurs at a lower heart rate than in health. This finding and two randomised double-blind clinical trials describing the benefit on exercise capacity of programming pacemakers using patients’ force frequency relationship information (JACC-HF 2018, Circulation 2020) have changed the way we view heart rate in heart failure.

He was co-investigator on the recently published REM-HF study (Eur Heart J) describing a neutral effect of remote monitoring in CHF patients (British Heart Foundation). He is the only cardiologist in the UK to have held an NIHR (UK) clinician scientist award, in his 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. He has recently published the results of the REDUCE-FMR study describing the potential of a transvenous coronary sinus-based approach to reducing mitral regurgitation in patients with heart failure and reduced ejection fraction (JACC-HF).