Grant: Project Grant - Priority Announcement: Patient-Oriented Research

Heart Failure (HF) is a common heart condition, which leads to death or disability in many people and also worsens their quality of life. Depression, sleep apnea (problems breathing at night referred to as OSA) and Cognitive impairment (memory, thinking problems) are very common in people with HF. Although these "DOC" conditions lead to worse outcomes in people with HF, they are often not tested for at regular HF clinic visits. We have created a simple, short screening test (the DOC screen) to help identify these DOC conditions during a regular clinical visit and have tested it in over 300 HF patients. We found that patients with HF were able to complete the screen quickly and that doctors could get useful information from the DOC screen that might help improve quality of life. However, it is not known if using this screen can us identify which patients are at higher risk for bad outcomes (like being admitted to hospital with worsening heart failure or another condition, like dehydration, pneumonia, depression and dementia, or death). The main goal of this study is to test if results of the DOC screen can help to predict which patients have these bad outcomes one year after their clinic visits. Our second goal is to see if there are differences in the impact of DOC conditions on potentially preventable hospital admissions. We will also look at the impact of DOC conditions for people in different age groups or for different sexes (male vs. female). We will screen 4,000 HF patients at their regular visit in 12 different clinics across Ontario and collect information on outcomes one year later using hospital records. If using the DOC screen helps to identify those patients at highest risk for bad outcomes, this will help us design better treatments for patients with HF to improve quality of life and lower the risks of dying or being hospitalized from HF.