ABSTRACT
Heart failure is a complex, progressive disease with unexpected acute exacerbations and
decreased functional status, marked symptom burden due to dyspnea and fatigue, and
impaired quality of life (1,2). Although there are various etiologies for the disease, the
development of heart failure is associated with a dramatic worsening of the prognosis of
the patient (3). Despite the improvement in outcomes of heart failure patients over the past
few decades, survival following the diagnosis of heart failure remains poor with a median
survival of 8 years and an estimated median survival of 1.64 years after a discharge for
decompensated heart failure (4). Given the poor prognosis overall in heart failure patients,
there have been intense efforts to identify those patients at particularly high risk of early
mortality to aid in counseling and medical decision making. Therefore, many factors have
been identified as markers of short-and long-term poor prognosis (5-7). These prognostic
factors are often identified through clinical experience, epidemiologic cohorts, and large,
clinical trials, and they can be grouped into several categories including clinical,
hemodynamic, electrophysiological, and biochemical markers. A detailed discussion of
prognostic factors in heart failure patients is found elsewhere in this text.
