The Seattle Heart Failure Model was created by Dr. Wayne C. Levy, associate professor of medicine in the Division of Cardiology at the UW, in collaboration with 13 co-authors. It is now available online at http://circ.ahajournals.org/ and will be published March 21 in the journal Circulation.
Heart failure has a mortality rate that can range from 5 percent to 75 percent per year. Patients and clinicians have not had an easy way to estimate survival. The Seattle Heart Failure Model was developed using very simple clinical and laboratory variables that are available to any health care provider. Some of these include age, gender, blood pressure, weight, heart failure medications/devices, and simple laboratory variables like hemoglobin, cholesterol, uric acid, and serum sodium. The model was derived by examining 1,125 heart failure patients, and validated in five additional groups, totaling 9,942 patients. The accuracy of the model was excellent.
"What is unique about this model is that one can estimate the change in an individual patient's survival by adding medications or devices used to treat heart failure," Levy said. "For example, a heart failure patient treated with only digoxin and diuretic therapy with a 20 percent annual mortality rate will live about four years on average. But according to the Seattle Heart Failure Model, if you add an ACE inhibitor the patient will live five years, and if you add an ACE inhibitor and a beta blocker the patient will live six and a half years.
"If you use an ACE inhibitor, beta blocker and an aldosterone blocker, the patient makes it to eight year
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Contact: Craig Degginger
craigd@u.washington.edu
206-616-3192
University of Washington
13-Mar-2006