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Clinical Takeaway
: Diuretic-induced weight loss is a valuable marker of effective decongestion and is associated with substantially fewer 30-day heart failure rehospitalizations.Context
When inpatients are receiving treatment for acute heart failure (HF), an easy-to-use measure of successful decongestion is diuretic-induced weight loss. To examine whether this metric predicts subsequent outcomes, researchers analyzed nearly 5000 adult patients (median age, 80) from the Swedish Heart Failure Registry who were hospitalized and treated with intravenous loop diuretics.
Key Results
Weight loss of ≥2 kg occurred in 59% of patients and was associated independently with lower risk at 30 days for HF readmission (hazard ratio, 0.59) and the composite outcome of cardiovascular (CV)-related death and HF readmission (HR, 0.76).
After 1 month (and through 1 year), these positive associations were no longer seen.
Weight change was not…