Survival time to complications of congestive heart failure patients at Felege Hiwot comprehensive specialized referral hospital, Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

BACKGROUNDS: Congestive heart failure is a serious chronic condition when the heart’s muscles become too damaged and a condition in which one or both ventricles cannot pump sufficient blood to meet the metabolic needs of the body. This study aimed to identify factors affecting the complications time of congestive heart failure patients treated from January 2016 to December 2019 at Felege Hiwot comprehensive specialized referral hospital in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia. METHODS: A hospital-based retrospective data collection was collected from the medical charts of 218 randomly selected congestive heart failure patients. The Kaplan-Meier curve and the Cox proportional hazards model were used to compare and identify the factors associated with time to complication in patients with congestive heart failure. RESULTS: The median complication time of congestive heart failure patients was 22 months [95% CI: 21.98–28.01]. About 194 (88.99%) of the patients were complicated. The Kaplan-Meier curve depicts the survival probability of complicated patients decreasing as the complication time increases. The hazard ratios for serum sodium concentration, left ventricular ejection fraction, patients from rural areas, age of patients, serum hemoglobin concentration, and New York heart association classes I, II, and III were given 0.94 [95% CI: 0.90–1.00], 0.74 [95% CI: 0.65–0.85], 0.75 [95% CI: 0.68–0.84], 1.28 [95% CI: 1.12–1.46], 0.89 [95% CI: 0.85–0.94], 0.44 [95% CI: 0.36–0.53], 0.54 [95% CI: 0.47–0.62] and 0.73 [95% CI: 0.65–0.81] respectively, and they are statistically associated with the complication time of congestive heart failure patients. CONCLUSIONS: The median complication time of congestive heart failure patients was 22 months. This study strongly suggests that healthcare awareness should be strengthened earlier about the potential complications for patients with lower serum sodium concentrations below the threshold and aged congestive heart failure patients to reduce the risk of developing complications.