The research team at the University of Oxford used over 54,000 GP records from people with heart failure to calculate the proportion surviving one, five and ten years following their diagnosis. Eighty one per cent of people with heart failure were alive a year after their diagnosis, 51% were alive after 5 years and 30% were still alive 10 years later. The figures are better overall than some previous reports however, when the survival rates for each year of the study were compared, there had not been any significant improvement over the period of the study which ran from 1998-2012.
Heart failure is a common condition which causes patients to feel out of breath and their ankles to swell up. We wanted to understand more about the disease and see if there had been an improvement in survival over time." - Dr Clare Taylor. GP and lead author, from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford.
Read the press release from the University of Oxford.
The Article, "Survival following a diagnosis of heart failure in primary care" is available at: https://academic.oup.com/fampra/article-lookup/doi/10.1093/fampra/cmw145