Klaus Witte
- Position: University Academic Fellow (Consultant)
- Areas of expertise: Cardiology; heart failure; clinical trials; patient access
- Email: K.K.Witte@leeds.ac.uk
- Location: Division of Cardiovascular and Diabetes Research
Profile
Dr Klaus Witte (FRCP, FESC, FACC, MD)
Senior Lecturer and Consultant Cardiologist
His research interests include vitamin D in CHF, and he 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. He 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. He is the only cardiologist in the UK to hold 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.
His 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. He has 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. He currently supervises three independently-funded PhD students and one NIHR-funded post doctoral researcher.
Research interests
Vitamin D
Heart failure
Electronic implantable cardiac devices
Health economics
Qualifications
- MD
- MBBS (Dist)
Professional memberships
- FESC
- FACC
- FRCP
Student education
I am currently supervising three PhD students, and two iBSc students. I teach on the BSc and MSc in Cardiac Physiology.
Research groups and institutes
- Leeds Institute of Cardiovascular and Metabolic Medicine
- Clinical and Population Science