Despite improvements in medical therapy for heart failure, more than 250,000 people die in the United States as a result of heart failure each year. There are multiple risk factors and models that have been created to identify these people, yet there has not been a significant impact on outcomes or change in the therapies for these patients. The authors review the available therapies for patients with advanced heart failure and the various risk models available to predict morbidity and mortality and present simple "office predictors" that could be used to potentially predict patients who would benefit from these therapies.
(c) 2008 Le Jacq