clinical and paraclinical characteristics of hospitalized patients with congestive heart failure in yazd (a survey of 258 patients)

introduction: the clinical and paraclinical characteristics of patients with congestive heart failure (chf) have been described by a number of previous studies, but very little information is available on this issue in iran. this study aimed to delineate the clinical and paraclinical characteristics of iranian patients hospitalized with chf. methods: during an observational, analytical, descriptive, cross-sectional study, 258 consecutive patients were interviewed and examined at 5 hospitals in yazd, iran from january to december 1999.questionnaire comprised of information regarding etiology, signs, symptoms, paraclinical data, etc. results were analyzed by spss9.01 and epi6 programs using anova, chi-square and t-test and reported as mean ± sd. results: the study population had a high mean age (67.59 ± 0.73), 0.8% were less than 35 years old and 70.80% were older than 65 years. mortality rate due to heart failure was 7.5%. major causes of chf were ischemia (65.1%), valvular lesions (5.8%), cardiomyopathy (5%) and hypertensive heart diseases (4.6%). mean number of hospitalizations per year was 2.2 ± 0.1, while mean hospitalization time was 7.25 ± 3.8 days and mean cost was 1122439 ± 89874.8 rials. conclusion: even though many background and aggravating factors of heart failure are preventable, this disease incurs a lot of expenditure on our country’s health system. therefore, there is a requirement for programming and research in the fields of education, treatment and prevention of this disease for all members of the community.