Who has advanced heart failure? Definition and epidemiology

Abstract

Summarizing current guidelines and advanced heart failure (AHF) clinical trials/registries, this review focuses on the current definition of AHF and emphasizes the secular trends in this definition over the last two decades. Further, clinical, imaging, hemodynamic, functional capacity and biomarker parameters that may aid clinicians to better recognize patients with AHF are reviewed. Finally, we review the limited data concerning the epidemiology of AHF which to date has been poorly characterized. © 2011 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.