Risk Assessment for Congestive Heart Failure in a South Indian Population: A Clinical Pharmacist’s Perspective.

Congestive heart failure (CHF) is becoming an increasingly prevalent healthcare problem. Hypertension (HT) is a major risk factor for CHF and it commonly coexists with other cardiovascular risk factors. The quality of risk that HT represents has to be thoroughly compared with other risk factors. This could have significant implications for primary prevention strategies including drug treatment. A study was conducted in 137 heart failure patients, to assess the contribution of cardiovascular risk factors like age, sex, obesity, HT, diabetes, dyslipidemia, alcohol, smoking and family history, individually and in combination, in the progression of CHF using multivariate logistic regression analysis and odds ratio (OR) (95% confidence interval). Of the various individual factors, HT showed 3.8 times greater risk (p = 0.003; OR-3.773) for heart failure; dyslipidemia exhibited 2.5 times risk (p = 0.07; OR-2.49), followed by others. Patients with HT, but no diabetes or dyslipidemia had 1.2 times risk (OR-1.17) for CHF; patients with hypertension and diabetes had 1.7 times risk (OR-1.69) and patients with HT, diabetes and dyslipidemia had two times greater risk (OR-1.87). Though, the present study emphasizes that HT is the most common risk factor in the progression of heart failure, the risk is high when it coexists with other risk factors like diabetes and dyslipidemia. A clinical pharmacist can work in collaboration with healthcare team in achieving the goal of long-term control of hypertension and other cardiovascular risk factors in millions of patients, by providing services ranging from monitoring drug therapy and improving patients compliance to drug therapy, to, health maintenance care such as ordering screening procedures and counseling regarding lifestyle modification.