Characteristics, treatments and 1‐year prognosis of hospitalized and ambulatory heart failure patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in the European Society of Cardiology Heart Failure Long‐Term Registry

Aims To describe the characteristics and assess the 1‐year outcomes of hospitalized (HHF) and chronic (CHF) heart failure patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) enrolled in a large European registry between May 2011 and April 2013. Methods and results Overall, 1334/6920 (19.3%) HHF patients and 1322/9409 (14.1%) CHF patients were diagnosed with COPD. In both groups, patients with COPD were older, more frequently men, had a worse clinical presentation and a higher prevalence of co‐morbidities. In HHF, the increase in the use of heart failure (HF) medications at hospital discharge was greater in non‐COPD than in COPD for angiotensin‐converting enzyme inhibitors (+13.7% vs. +7.2%), beta‐blockers (+20.6% vs. +11.8%) and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists (+20.9% vs. +17.3%), thus widening the gap in HF treatment already existing between the two groups at admission. In CHF patients, there was a similar increase in the use of these medications after enrollment visit in the two groups, leaving a significant difference of 8.2% for beta‐blockers in favour of non‐COPD patients (89.8% vs. 81.6%, P