Prognostic Clinical Phenotypes of Patients with Acute Decompensated Heart Failure.

Introduction: Acute decompensated heart failure (AHF) is a clinical syndrome with a poor prognosis.

Aim: This study was conducted to identify clusters of inpatients with acute decompensated heart failure that shared similarities in their clinical features.

Methods: We analyzed data from a cohort of patients with acute decompensated heart failure hospitalized between February 2013 and January 2017 in a Department of Cardiology. Patients were clustered using factorial analysis of mixed data. The clusters (phenotypes) were then compared using log-rank tests and profiled using a logistic model. In total, 458 patients (255; 55.7% male) with a mean (SD) age of 72.7 (11.1) years were included in the analytic dataset. The demographic, clinical, and laboratory features were included in the cluster analysis.

Results: The two clusters were significantly different in terms of time to mortality and re-hospitalization (all P < 0.001). Cluster profiling yielded an accurate discriminating model (AUC = 0.934). Typically, high-risk patients were elderly females with a lower estimated glomerular filtration rate and hemoglobin on admission compared to the low-risk phenotype. Moreover, the high-risk phenotype had a higher likelihood of diabetes type 2, transient ischemic attack/cerebrovascular accident, previous heart failure or ischemic heart disease, and a higher serum potassium concentration on admission. Patients with the high-risk phenotype were of higher New York Heart Association functional classes and more positive in their medication history.

Conclusions: There are two phenotypes among patients with decompensated heart failure, high-risk and low-risk for mortality and re-hospitalization. They can be distinguished by easy-to-measure patients' characteristics.