Identifying Heart Failure Patients at High Risk for Near-Term Cardiovascular Events With Serial Health Status Assessments

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Abstract
Background— Identification of heart failure outpatients at increased risk for clinical deterioration remains a critical challenge, with few tools currently available to assist clinicians. We tested whether serial health status assessments with the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) can identify patients at increased risk for mortality and hospitalization. Methods and Results— We evaluated 1358 patients with heart failure after an acute myocardial infarction in the Eplerenone’s Neurohormonal Efficacy and Survival Study, a multicenter randomized trial that included serial KCCQ assessments. Cox proportional-hazards models were used to examine whether changes in KCCQ scores during successive outpatient visits were independently associated with all-cause mortality and cardiovascular mortality or hospitalization. Change in KCCQ (ΔKCCQ) was linearly associated with all-cause mortality (hazard ratio [HR], for each 5-point decrease in ΔKCCQ, 1.11; 95% CI, 1.04 to 1.19) and the combined outcome of card...

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