Factors Influencing the Risk of Death among Patients with Heart Failure.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of risk factors on the death of patients with heart failure in a cohort of patients hospitalized with heart failure disease. In this paper we used chisquare tests with the aim of studying the relationship of each factor with survival. Generalized Additive Models (GAM), particularly Generalized Additive Logistic Regression Model, was used to examine the impact of risk factors on the death of patients with heart failure out of 263 patients considered in the analysis, 18.6% patients died of heart failure. A death proportion for female was 19.6% and that of male patients was 17.5%. From the GAM analysis the predictors: age, anemia, Tuberculosis, HIV status, renal inefficiency, diabetes, hypertension and sinus were found to significantly affect the death status of a patient. Being older age, anemic, renal inefficient, TB positive, HIV positive, diabetic, hypertensive and sinus positive increase the risk of death of a heart failure patient.

Learning Bayesian Networks Using Heart Failure Data.

Background: Several factors may affect heart failure status of patients. It is important to investigate whether or not the effects are direct. The purpose of this study was learning Bayesian networks that encode the joint probability distribution for a set of random variables. Methods: The design was a retrospective cohort study. The target population for this study was heart failure patients who were under follow- up at Asella referral teaching Hospital from February, 2009 to March, 2012. Bayesian Network is used in this paper to examine causal relationships between variables via Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG). Results: Death of patients can be determined using HIV, hypertension, diabetes, anemia, renal inefficiency and sinus. Hypertension and sinus were found to have direct effects while TB had only indirect effect. Age did not have an effect. Conclusion: Anemia, HIV, diabetes mellitus renal inefficiency and sinus directly affect the death of heart failure patient. Death is conditionally independent on TB and age, given all other variables.