A condensed version of the Kansas City Cardiomyopathy Questionnaire (KCCQ) can help clinicians predict the short- and long-term risk of adverse cardiovascular outcomes among patients with acute heart failure (HF), according to new data published in JACC: Heart Failure.
Researchers focused on KCCQ-12, which reduces the traditional KCCQ to just 12 questions. The team evaluated the KCCQ scores of nearly 5,000 patients, using data from the China PEACE 5p-HF study. While 63% of those patients were men, the mean patient age was 67 years old.
Overall, poor KCCQ-12 scores were associated with higher 30-day and on-year risks of cardiovascular death or HF rehospitalization. Moreover, after making certain adjustments, each 10-point decline in a patient's KCCQ-12 score was linked with a 13% increase of their 30-day risk and a 7% increase of their one-year risk of that outcome.
Patients with lower KCCQ-12 scores tended to be older, female and from lower socio/economic backgrounds. They also tended to present with elevated NT-proBNP levels and more comorbidities.
“For the first time, our study demonstrated short and long-term prognostic importance of the KCCQ-12 score in a large prospective cohort of patients hospitalized for HF,” wrote lead author Danli Hu, MD, with the National Clinical Research Center for Cardiovascular Diseases in China, and colleagues. “It was one of the largest cohorts with prospective capture of KCCQ measures, and it also provided data for KCCQ in HF in a large Chinese population, which has not been well represented in existing data.”
The authors concluded that KCCQ-12 scores can help manage patients with acute HF—and potentially save many lives.
Read the full study here.