Coexisting morbidity burden in elderly hospitalized patients with and without heart failure.

Introduction: Aging, cardiovascular disease (CVD), and heart failure (HF) increase the coexisting morbidity (CM) burden. This study compared the contribution of HF with this increase in elderly patients hospitalized for CVD by comparing patients with and without HF.

Methods: Consecutive patients aged >65 years, hospitalized with CVD, were included (104 with and 100 without HF).

Relative contribution of risk factors/co-morbidities to heart failure pathogenesis: interaction with ejection fraction.

Aims: The relative impact of each individual coexisting morbidity on the pathogenesis of heart failure (HF) is incompletely understood. This study aimed to evaluate the prevalence of individual cardiac and non-cardiac coexisting morbidities both in the overall HF population and in the subgroup of HF patients with a single coexisting morbidity, stratified by left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) categories, as a measure of the relative contribution of each co-morbidity to the pathogenesis of HF.

Methods And Results: This is a prospective, observational study, in which unselected ambulatory patients with chronic HF visiting the HF clinic of a tertiary university hospital from January 2016 to January 2019 were classified according to baseline LVEF into three groups: (i) LVEF < 40%, (ii) LVEF = 40-49%, and (iii) LVEF ≥ 50% and then evaluated for various coexisting morbidities.