Comorbidity trajectories before and after the diagnosis of heart failure: A UK Biobank cohort study

Heart failure (HF) is frequently associated with multiple comorbidities. We aimed to define their trajectory of accrual to identify opportunities for disease prevention.

We identified all participants in the UK Biobank cohort study diagnosed with HF prior to enrolment or during follow-up, who had disease occurrence data available from both primary and secondary care records (n = 9824). We established the time between diagnosis of HF and 16 common comorbidities to determine the rate and sequence of comorbidity accrual in relation to HF. Stratified analyses considered associations with sex and age at diagnosis of HF. In chronological sequence, HF was the median fourth diagnosis for men and women. As the age at HF diagnosis increased, HF came later in the sequence of diseases (median second in under 50 years to fifth in those aged 80-90 years). In all age strata, comorbidities accumulated for over a decade before HF and this accelerated in the years immediately before HF. The median time between comorbidity and HF diagnoses ranged from depression preceding HF by 10.7 years to dementia proceeding HF by 0.7 years; all comorbidities presented earlier in women. Atrial fibrillation/flutter was the commonest disease to immediately precede HF, followed by hypertension, cancer, myocardial infarction and osteoarthritis.

Heart failure is most often diagnosed in people with established multiple long-term conditions. There is a protracted window of opportunity during which interventions to prevent HF could be applied, often in disease contexts where this is not routine care, such as cancer and osteoarthritis.