Echocardiography, Natriuretic Peptides, and Risk for Incident Heart Failure in Older Adults: The Cardiovascular Health Study

Objectives—To examine the potential utility of echocardiography and NT-proBNP for heart failure (HF) risk stratification in concert with a validated clinical HF risk score in older adults. Background—Without clinical guidance, echocardiography and natriuretic peptides have suboptimal test characteristics for population-wide HF risk stratification. However, the value of these tests has not been examined in concert with a clinical HF risk score. Methods—We evaluated the improvement in 5-year HF risk prediction offered by adding an echocardiographic score or/and NT-proBNP levels to the clinical Health ABC HF Risk Score (base model) in 3752 participants of the Cardiovascular Health Study (age, 72.6±5.4 years; 40.8% men; 86.5 % white). The echocardiographic score was derived as the weighted sum of independent echocardiographic predictors of HF. We assessed changes in Bayesian information criterion (BIC), C index, integrated discrimination improvement (IDI), and net reclassification improvement (NRI). We examined also the weighted NRI across baseline HF risk categories under multiple scenarios of event versus nonevent weighting. Results—Reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, abnormal E/A ratio, enlarged left atrium, and increased left ventricular mass, were independent echocardiographic predictors of HF. Adding the echocardiographic score and NT-proBNP levels to the clinical model improved BIC (echocardiography: −43, NT-proBNP: −64.1, combined: −68.9; all p<0.001) and C index (baseline 0.746; echocardiography: +0.031, NT-proBNP: +0.027, combined: +0.043; all p<0.01) and yielded robust IDI (echocardiography: 43.3%, NT-proBNP: 42.2%, combined: 61.7%; al