IMR Press / RCM / Volume 12 / Issue 4 / DOI: 10.3909/ricm0579

Reviews in Cardiovascular Medicine (RCM) is published by IMR Press from Volume 19 Issue 1 (2018). Previous articles were published by another publisher in Open Access under a CC-BY (or CC-BY-NC-ND) licence, and they are hosted by IMR Press on imrpress.com as a courtesy and upon agreement with MedReviews, LLC.

Open Access Review
Temporal Variation of Heart Failure Hospitalization: Does It Exist?
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1 Department of Internal Medicine, University of Ferrara, Italy
2 Department of Clinical and Experimental Medicine, University of Ferrara, Italy
Rev. Cardiovasc. Med. 2011, 12(4), 211–218; https://doi.org/10.3909/ricm0579
Published: 30 December 2011
Abstract
Congestive heart failure (CHF) is the end stage of many cardiac diseases, and one of the leading causes of mortality and morbidity around the world. Coronary heart disease and hypertension (either singly or together) are the main etiology for CHF. It has been reported that major acute cardiovascular events (myocardial infarction, sudden death, cardiac arrest, ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke, pulmonary embolism, rupture/dissection of aortic aneurysms) do not occur randomly through time, but exhibit a specific temporal periodicity characterized by seasonal (winter), weekly (Monday), and circadian (morning) patterns of onset. Thus, because the major causes of CHF present a temporal pattern, in the past several years some studies have investigated the temporal variation of CHF hospitalization and mortality, with results indicating the possibility of a preference for winter months, Mondays, and nighttime, respectively.
Keywords
Heart failure
Chronobiology
Seasons
Hospitalization
Outcome clinical
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