Study Highlights Mobility as Key to Improved Outcomes for Heart Failure Patients - Video

Compared with those who spent most of their time in a single room, people with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) who were able to travel outside of their home without assistance were significantly less likely to be hospitalized or die within a year, according to a study being presented at the American College of Cardiology’s Annual Scientific Session.

The findings underscore the value of supporting holistic care and encouraging people with heart failure to maintain an active lifestyle and engage with others in their community to the extent possible, researchers said.

The study used a metric known as life-space mobility to quantify the degree to which patients moved around in their communities over the course of one month. Life-space mobility has been shown to be a reliable marker of risk of adverse outcomes in people with a variety of chronic diseases, including chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic kidney disease and peripheral artery disease, but the new study is the first to assess it in the context of HFpEF.

To assess whether life-space mobility could offer insights relevant to HFpEF care, researchers administered questionnaires to 175 consecutive patients treated for HFpEF at Weill Cornell Medical Center between 2019-2023. They then evaluated the relationship between patients’ life-space mobility scores and their likelihood of dying or being hospitalized within one year, the study’s composite primary endpoint.

Analysis revealed that those who scored in the lowest tertile for life-space mobility were 2.4 times more likely to die or be hospitalized within one year compared with those in the highest tertile. The researchers found that patients who were less likely to leave their homes than those who were more independent were significantly more likely to suffer these outcomes even after accounting for race and MAGGIC score, a clinical calculator that has been demonstrated to predict adverse outcomes among patients with HFpEF on other validated risk assessment tools.

Multiple factors could influence whether a patient is able to move beyond their room or home, and researchers were not able to directly account for factors such as medication adherence that may play a role.