Heart failure hospitalizations down 30 pct

Heart-failure related hospitalizations declined about 30 percent among Medicare patients between 1998 and 2008, U.S. researchers found. Dr. Jersey Chen of the Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Conn., and colleagues conducted a study that included data of 55,097,390 fee-for-service Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized between 1998 and 2008 with a principal discharge diagnosis code for heart failure. The patients were from acute care hospitals in the United States and Puerto Rico. The study, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, found there was a relative decline of 29.5 percent of the overall risk-adjusted heart failure hospitalization rate from 1998 to 2008. The average age of heart failure patients increased from 79 years to 79.9 years over the study period. There was a decrease in the proportion of female patients -- 58.9 percent to 55.7 percent -- and an increase in the proportion of black patients from 11.3 percent to 11.7 percent, the study found. The study authors concluded the overall decline in heart failure hospitalization rate was principally due to fewer individual patients being hospitalized with heart failure, rather than a reduction in the frequency of heart failure hospitalizations. The decline in this rate was significantly higher than the change in the national rate in 16 states and significantly lower in three states -- Wyoming, Rhode Island and Connecticut.