Heart failure mortality declining in Sweden

A national study has shown that heart failure mortality has decreased in Sweden over the last two decades. Despite these improvements, the prognosis for heart failure patients remains worrying — 25 percent of those diagnosed in 2022 died within a year.

“Our results suggest that advances in heart failure treatment over the past decades have reduced heart failure mortality, both at the population level and for individual patients. This is an encouraging message for the continued implementation of existing treatments, which are still underutilised, as well as for the development of new treatments,” says senior author Gianluigi Savarese, Associate Professor of Cardiology at the Department of Medicine, Solna, Karolinska Institutet.

The study showed that the improvements were more marked in patients with heart failure with reduced left ventricular function, where several life-prolonging treatments have been developed in recent decades. For patients with heart failure and preserved left ventricular function, where evidence-based treatment options are limited, improvement was slower.

“These results show the great need for research into new treatments for patients with heart failure and preserved left ventricular function, who make up about half of the heart failure population,” says the study’s first author Felix Lindberg, postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Medicine, Solna, Karolinska Institutet and continues:

“But this study also gives hope that recent advances in heart failure treatment can continue to improve the quality of life and survival of heart failure patients in Sweden.”

The next steps in the research include using the Swedish Heart Failure Registry to proactively identify patients with heart failure who need intensified treatment.

The study was funded by the Swedish Heart-Lung Foundation and has no reported conflicts of interest according to the researchers.