Heart Failure in Older Patients: An Update

Heart failure (HF) is a clinical syndrome with high incidence and prevalence and high morbidity and death rate, even in the short term, representing a serious public health issue, mainly in older people. It is a growing cause for hospital admission in this age group, being frequently associated with several comorbidities, further aggravating the disease’s course. Moreover, older HF patients are usually affected by clinical conditions, like frailty, malnutrition, and cachexia, which significantly impact the overall management of HF and need to be properly identified and treated. Diagnosing and managing HF in older patients may be very complicated and challenging. Although specific data on treatment of both acute and chronic HF in older subjects are limited and mainly extrapolated from large-scale clinical trials, the standard pharmacological management may be considered well-tolerated and generally safe. In any case, a personalized and tailored approach is mandatory and is based on severity of comorbidities, overall status, and prognosis, above all in frailer and more comorbid subjects, due to the higher rate of drug interactions, side effects, and therapy discontinuation in this population. In this scenario, palliative care has become a fundamental part of HF management in the elderly in order to improve their care and the quality of life. Moreover, an increasing number of promising pharmacological options deserve further investigation in order to support clinicians in optimizing management of comorbid and frailer patients. In this work, we provide detailed and updated insight into clinical, therapeutic, and prognostic features of both acute and chronic HF in the older population.