Study close to the heart
A multinational study involving heart failure patients across Asia has uncovered valuable information on the outcome and prevalence of the major risk factors for the disease. The large-scale project is initiated by the National University Heart Centre, Singapore (NUHCS), in partnership with the National Heart Centre Singapore (NHCS) and collaborators including NUS. A total of 5,276 heart failure patients were recruited from 50 centres distributed over 11 Asian regions.
The Singapore data threw up some worrying statistics about the three key risk factors for heart failure — out of the 1,066 participating patients, 62 per cent had coronary artery disease, 70 per cent had hypertension and 58 per cent had diabetes. Furthermore, the average body mass index (BMI) of Singaporean patients was 25.9; a cause for concern as BMI higher than 23 increases one’s chance of getting heart disease and diabetes, besides other health issues.
Principal Investigator Associate Professor Carolyn Lam, a Senior Consultant at NHCS’ Department of Cardiology and Associate Professor with the Programme in Cardiovascular and Metabolic Disorders at Duke-NUS Medical School, pointed out that despite the troubling revelation, these cardiovascular risk factors are modifiable. “By extension, this means that most of us will be able to lower our risk of developing heart failure if we keep to a healthy lifestyle through a sensible diet and regular exercise. Singapore’s recently announced war on diabetes is a prime example of efforts underway to improve outcomes among our patients,” she said.
Assoc Prof Lam, who is a faculty member at NUS Medicine and also Clinician Scientist with the SingHealth Duke-NUS Cardiovascular Sciences Academic Clinical Programme, added: “Based on this study, one possible explanation for the high cardiovascular risk profile we see in Asian patients with heart failure may be the rapid development of some regions in the last few decades.”
The Asian Sudden Cardiac Death in Heart Failure (ASIAN-HF) registry was started in 2012 to gather real world data on the demographics and risk factors of heart failure patients from China, India, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
The most recent findings revealed that Asian patients involved in the study were relatively young with an average age of 60 years old, yet 64 per cent of them had two or more risk factors for heart failure. Ethnic differences existed: for instance, Chinese patients across Asia were more than twice as likely to develop coronary artery disease as the Japanese or South Koreans, while Malay patients had the highest risk of diabetes among all the Asian ethnic groups. Income can also influence one’s health: for example, Indian patients from higher-income regions such as Singapore had five times the risk of developing diabetes than their counterparts from lower-income regions like India.
Professor Mark Richards, Chair of the Executive Committee of ASIAN-HF, highlighted that the study has provided the first prospective multinational data from Asia “which shows that, aside from a consistently early age of onset compared with the West, there is no single Asian phenotype, and that Asian heart failure patients are very different from each other based on the region they are living in and their ethnicity.” Prof Richards, Director of Research at NUHCS, is also the Director of the Cardiovascular Research Institute of Singapore at NUS.
See other findings of the study.
