Impact of infection-related admission in patients with heart failure: a 10 years national cohort study

Infection is a common cause of hospitalization in patients with heart failure (HF). The impact of infection on long term cardiovascular outcome in HF is not well studied. The aim of this study was to compare the long term risk of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) in HF patients with or without prior hospitalization for infection. From 2009 to 2015, 310,485 patients with their first HF admissions were enrolled from the Taiwan National Health Insurance Research Database. Among the patients, those with readmission due to infection within one year after HF discharge were defined as infection group and those without any infection admission were controls. The propensity score matching method was used to balance covariates between the two groups. Patients were followed until the occurrence of any component of the MACE or the end date of the study, December 31, 2019. In a mean follow-up time of 4.29 ± 2.92 years, 86.19% of patients in the infection group and 63.63% of patients in the control group had MACE. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards analysis showed the infection group had a higher risk of MACE (HR 1.760, 95% CI 1.714–1.807), including all-cause mortality (HR 1.587, 95% CI 1.540–1.636), myocardial infarction (HR 1.332, 95% CI 1.224–1.450), stroke (HR 1.769, 95% CI 1.664–1.882) and hospitalization for HF (HR 1.993, 95% CI 1.922–2.066). In conclusion, many HF patients discharged from the hospital experienced acute infection that required readmission. The patients had worse cardiovascular outcome after readmission for infectious disease compared to those without any infection.