ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1, we noted the often erratic disease trajectory of heart failure and the frequency of sudden death – factors that would seem to make prediction in individual patients very difficult. The rather scanty data we have about doctors’ predictions in heart failure would seem to bear this out. In early heart failure, primary care doctors may tend to overestimate the risk of death – at least in Switzerland.1 On the other hand, the SUPPORT study,2 carried out in the mid1990s in the USA, found that 50% of heart failure patients were given a prognosis of more than 6 months on the day before they died.
