The CBS Evening News (10/18, story 7, 0:20, Pelley) reported, “We’re making some progress, it turns out, in the fight against heart disease. A report out today says the number of older Americans admitted to hospitals with heart failure in the past decade dropped nearly 30%.”

The AP (10/19, Johnson) reports, “Hospital stays for heart failure fell a remarkable 30 percent in Medicare patients over a decade, the first such decline in the United States and forceful evidence that the nation is making headway in reducing the billion-dollar burden of a common condition,” according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. “But the study of 55 million patients, the largest ever on heart failure trends, found only a slight decline in deaths within a year of leaving the hospital, and progress lagged for black men.”

Bloomberg News (10/19, Cortez) reports that the drop in heart failure-related hospitalizations saved Medicare “$4.1 billion annually. In the largest study of its kind, investigators analyzed heart-failure hospitalizations among 55 million people in the US Medicare program. An extra 229,000 hospital stays among the 27.3 million people in Medicare’s fee-for-service program in 2008 would have occurred if rates had stayed the same,” the study found.

The Hartford Courant (10/19, Weir) points out that “among older Americans heart failure is the biggest cause of hospitalizations and re-hospitalizations. Treating heart failure requires many resources, and direct and indirect costs were estimated to be $39.2 billion in 2010.”

“Using fee-for-service data on more than 55 million Medicare beneficiaries, researchers found a 29.5% drop in the risk-adjusted heart failure hospitalization rate over the 10-year period” from 1998 to 2008, Modern Healthcare (10/19, McKinney, Subscription Publication) explains. “That steep decline could be due to a number of factors, including improved control of hypertension, a cause of heart failure; decreases in the rates of ischemic heart disease; and growing use of outpatient management of heart failure, according to the study.”

“However, the proportion of black patients hospitalized for heart failure increased from 11.3 percent in 1998 to 11.7 percent in 2008,”HealthDay (10/18, Reinberg) points out. What’s more, “deaths at one year from heart failure” only “decreased from 31.7 percent in 1999 to 29.6 percent in 2008.”

According to MedPage Today (10/19, Phend), “an accompanying editorial pointed to the results as a sign of hope, though with plenty of room for improvement. The ‘persistently’ and ‘unacceptably’ high one-year mortality rates suggested a need for immediate attention to heart failure postdischarge practices,” the editorialists wrote. Indeed, “‘There is more work to be done,’ agreed Ralph Brindis, MD, immediate past-president of the American College of Cardiology, in a statement. While overall trends are on the right track, not all groups benefited equally, he noted.

” The Wall Street Journal (10/19, A4, Winslow, Wang, Subscription Publication) also covers the story. For a clinical perspective, go toCardioSource.

Monitoring Biomarker Levels May Benefit Heart Failure Patients. MedPage Today (10/19, Kaiser) reports, “Monitoring levels of amino-terminal pro–B-type natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) and keeping them below a certain threshold proved to be more beneficial for heart failure patients than the standard of care,” according to a study published Oct. 25 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. In the PROTECT study, “those in the NT-proBNP monitoring arm had significantly fewer cardiovascular events (58 versus 100, P=0.009) at a mean follow-up of 10 months,” researchers found. What’s more, “patients in the biomarker-monitored arm had fewer events per patient (0.77 versus 1.3, P=0.03) and a longer duration before their first event.”

Source: CardioSource.org