A New Evaluation Tool That Could Predict Death Risk in Heart Patients

A new evaluation tool can predict the mortality risk in patients hospitalized with heart failure say researchers based on findings of a recent study. According to researchers the new bedside tool is a first of its kind for the treatment of acute heart failure and offers a simple, quick way for clinicians to assess mortality risk upon hospital admission and quickly decide on a treatment strategy.

Researchers used data from more than 100,000 heart failure patients to develop a risk model after analyzing 33,046 hospitalizations. The overall mortality risk for patients hospitalized with acute heart failure was about 4 percent. The model determined mortality risk levels starting from low risk at about 2 percent up to nearly 22 percent for patients at the highest mortality risk.

Researchers evaluated 39 possible factors as survival indicators upon hospital admission. It was observed that the best single predictor for mortality was a high blood urea nitrogen level (above 43 milligrams per deciliter), followed by a low systolic blood pressure (above 115 millimeters of mercury) and a high serum creatinine (higher than 2.75 milligrams per deciliter).

Now that researchers have the ability to easily categorize patients by high and low mortality risk, they say that the new model may provide a more effective way to design clinical trials for evaluating heart failure therapies.