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Luc W. Eurlings, James L. Januzzi, Yigal M. Pinto, Is acute heart failure a highly prevalent orphan disease?
, European Heart Journal, Volume 27, Issue 22, November 2006, Pages 2619–2620, https://doi.org/10.1093/eurheartj/ehl332The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the Editors of the European Heart Journal or of the European Society of Cardiology.
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A large proportion of patients admitted to a cardiology service suffer from acute heart failure (HF). Despite these high numbers, there is surprising little scientific evidence regarding the treatment of this patient group. Most studies of HF treatment have investigated subjects with chronic, stable HF, whether or not preceded by an acute phase of decompensation. But patients with acute HF are a fundamentally different population when compared with chronic heart failure (CHF) patients, as a part of the latter have proven to be more able to survive acute HF and stabilize to a chronic form and some CHF patients did not experience an acute episode at all. Indeed, to what extent the population of acute HF patients differs from the well-known CHF patient is shown by an important current report from the EuroHeart Survey (EHS).1 This report describes a large population of acute HF patients. The population described in this report differs substantially from the prototypical CHF population where efficacy of current HF medication has been proven. This difference invokes to question whether acute HF is indeed merely the preclude to CHF, or whether the acute HF population rather represents a broader spectrum of diseases with very different underlying aetiologies. In other words, the question arises whether acute and chronic HF are comparable enough to take the strategies tested in chronic, stable HF patients and apply these to subjects who have been stabilized after an episode of acute HF.
