Patients with heart failure, or suspected of having it, are not being diagnosed quickly enough, according to a study involving 8,000 patients, which was presented June 15 at the Heart Failure Association of the European Society of Cardiology.
Over the five-year period of the study, researchers found that two-thirds of patients were suspected of having heart failure, but fewer than 30% were given a diagnosis for it within one year.
Patients suspected of having heart failure were also hospitalized eight times more often than others and their risk of death was nearly double. Both of these facts were also true for patients with high NT-proBNP levels, or a biomarker for heart failure.
The delay in confirming a heart failure diagnosis prolongs the time it takes for a patient getting proper treatment.
Even when patients were quickly tested for the biomarker, it still took around 40 days for them to get an echocardiogram done. From that group, only 29% received a formal diagnosis within a year, according to the study.
"The trouble is getting an echo and getting a specialist heart failure person to see the patient," Lisa Anderson, MD, the lead author of the study, told TCTMD. "That's taking too long because there aren't enough technicians, there aren't enough heart failure specialists. So, there’s a big gap—we suspect the patient has heart failure — the NT-proBNP is really high — and yet, we just wait and wait and wait. It's during that time period that we're at risk."
A more intense focus on results of the biomarker tests by clinicians, may help identify cases of heart failure more quickly, the study suggests.