Abstract
Background: With the development of our country, the elderly's life expectancy is increasing. Elderly hospitalized patients with heart valve disease always need assessment methods to ensure patient safety. Therefore, recent studies have focused on finding frailty tools to predict, screen, and prevent adverse outcomes. Currently, in our country, the studies on the frailty syndrome in patients heart valve diseases are still few. There is little evidence about the prevalence of frailty syndrome in the elderly with valvular heart disease and how are the contributing factors?
Objective: This study aims to describe prevalene of frailty syndrome in elderly patients with valvular heart disseases and determine some contributing factors?
Patients: Consecutive patients admitted to in-patient facilities with a defined diagnosis of valvular heart disease and with the age over ≥ 60 year-old.
Result: From August 2021 to August 2022, 132 older patients with valvular heart disseases were recruited at National Geriatric Hospital Vietnam and Vietnam National Heart Institute, Bachmai Hospital. The prevalence of frailty syndrome in elderly patients with valvular heart disease is 42.4%. Some clinical characteristics and risk factors in the group of elderly valvular disease patients and frailty syndrome are: higher mean age 77.3 ± 9.76 vs. 70 ,3 ± 8.37; higher rate of diabetes (41.07% vs 21.03%); higher rate of previous stroke (19.64% vs 5.26%) than the other group (p=0.01). Frailty older valvular disease patients also have higher rate of unintentional weight loss; weakness or poor handgrip strength; self-reported exhaustion; slower walking speed; and lower physical activity (p<0.05). There is no consensus on the trend of increasing the rate of fraity syndrome in older patients with valvular heart disease. The elderly group of patients with aortic regurgitation and tricuspid regurgitation had a 2.82 times higher risk of frailty (OR=2.82, p=0.007); 2.06 times (OR=2.06, p=0.05. In contrast, the group of patients with aortic stenosis had a 0.27 times lower risk of ASCVD compared with the group without stenosis (OR=0.27, p=0.05).
Conclusion: The study result shown the rather high prevalence of fraity syndrome in older patients with valvular heart disease and some relevant risk factors were diabetes, previous stroke.