RT journal article
T1 Health literacy and prognosis of heart failure: a prospective propensity-matched study in the community
A1 Gómez, Rocío
A1 Andrey Guerrero, José Luis
A1 Puerto Alonso, José Luis
A1 Romero Salado, Sotero Pedro
A1 Pedrosa Martínez, María José
A1 Rosety Rodríguez, Manuel
A1 Gómez Rodríguez, Francisco
A2 Medicina
A2 Neurociencias
K1 Admission
K1 Health literacy
K1 Heart failure
K1 Hospitalization
K1 Mortality
AB AbstractAims: Health literacy (HL), the ability to obtain and understand health information, is critical to self-care in chronic disorders. A low HL is common among these patients and has been associated with a worse prognosis. Nevertheless, the relationship between HL and the prognosis of heart failure (HF) with reduced (HFrEF) vs. preserved (HFpEF) ejection fraction remains unsettled. To analyse the relationship between HL and the prognosis of patients with incident HFrEF and HFpEF.Methods and results: Prospective study over 10 years (2010-19) on 6444 patients diagnosed with incident HF. The main outcomes were mortality, hospitalizations, and visits to emergency services. The independent relationship between HL and the prognosis, stratifying patients for cardiovascular comorbidity after propensity score-matching was analysed.After matching 5355 HF patients, 1785 with low HL (874 with HFrEF and 911 with HFpEF) vs. 3570 with adequate HL (1748 with HFrEF and 1822 with HFpEF), during a median follow-up of 5.41 years, 3874 patients died (72.3%) and 3699 patients were hospitalized (69.1%). After adjustment for potential confounders, an adequate HL was associated with a lower all-cause and cardiovascular mortality, less hospitalizations, and less 30-day readmissions [relative risk (RR) for HF <0.72 (0.66-0.86), RR for HFrEF <0.69 (0.63-0.95), and RR for HFpEF <0.62 (0.55-0.88), P < 0.001 in all cases], both for patients with HFrEF and HFpEF. Analyses of recurrent hospitalizations gave larger HL effects than time-to-first-event analyses.Conclusions: In this propensity-matched study, a low HL is associated with a worse prognosis of patients with incident HFrEF and HFpEF.
SN 1873-1953
YR 2023
FD 2023-04-12
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10498/30665
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10498/30665
LA eng
DS Repositorio Institucional de la Universidad de Cádiz
RD 09-may-2026