Introduction

In studies of drug-induced corrected QT (QTc) changes, fixed universal heart rate (HR) corrections (e.g., the Fridericia correction) are potentially misleading when assessing the effects of drugs that change HR. When data-specific corrections are designed, tests of their validity are needed. The proposed tests include zero correlations between QTc and corresponding RR values in the complete study data (pooling on-treatment and off-treatment interval measurements).
Objective

To document that this approach is potentially highly misleading, a statistical modeling study was conducted based on the full profiles of QT/RR data of 523 healthy subjects—254 females, mean age 33.5 years.
Methods

In each of the subjects, 50 baseline QT/RR readings were selected to model baseline data. In repeated experiments, groups of ten and 50 subjects were randomly selected and drug-induced HR increases between 0 and 25 beats per minute combined with QTc changes between − 20 and + 20 ms were modeled. In each experiment, subject-specific as well as population-specific HR corrections were designed so that the QTc interval data were uncorrelated to the corresponding RR interval data.
Results

The simulation experiments showed that when zero correlations of QTc data with RR data are combined with more than trivial HR increases, the HR corrections are substantially biased and underestimate or fully eliminate any drug-induced QTc interval changes. This result is in full agreement with theoretical considerations of HR correction principles.
Conclusions

The lack of correlation of QTc versus RR durations including on-treatment data does not prove any validity of HR corrections. Correlations of QTc versus RR in study data pooling on- and off-drug measurements should not be used to prove the appropriateness of HR corrections.