New research article: ‘Impact of Acute Hemoglobin Falls in Heart Failure Patients: A Population Study’

One of the pilots within the BigMedilytics project is studying the impact of comorbidities in chronic diseases and how the clustering contributes to increase risk of hospitalization and reduce survival.

Heart failure is a mounting disease and factors around it can impact on prognosis. In particular, blood loss can contribute to significant reductions in hemoglobin levels. Antiplatelet and anticoagulant treatment, with or without gastrointestinal lesions, as well as acute kidney injury, induce episodes of rapid hemoglobin reduction. This fall not only impacts on comorbidities frequently present in heart failure patients but also increases the myocardial workload.

In the present study, with a large cohort of heart failure patients (45,437), episodes of hemoglobin falls increased the risk of acute heart failure hospitalization and all-cause mortality. Furthermore, the intensity of hemoglobin reduction during the episodes did not seem to be relevant. Hemoglobin falls produce an increase in risk beyond an acute episode in heart failure patients. With the progressive increase in the incidence of heart failure and hospitalization due to acute heart failure, strategies to reduce the risk should include a more careful follow-up in patients with episodes of hemoglobin falls.

The study ‘Impact of Acute Hemoglobin Falls in Heart Failure Patients: A Population Study‘, conducted by researchers from INCLIVA, was published in the Journal of Clinical Medicine, an international peer-reviewed open access journal published monthly online by MDPI.