Excerpt

We read with great interest the article by Kaya et al. [1] about influenza vaccination in patients with heart failure (HF). The authors demonstrated that regular influenza vaccination reduced HF-related hospitalization and recurrent hospitalization in this population. However, they concluded that vaccination did not decrease cardiovascular mortality contrary to the findings of other studies in the literature. ‟Influenza Vaccination in Patients with Chronic Heart Failure” (subanalysis of the PARADIGM-HF Trial) and ‟Influenza Vaccine and Survival in Acute Heart Failure” are recent important studies [2, 3] about influenza vaccination in patients with HF. These two studies showed that vaccination was associated with reduced risk for mortality but not HF-related hospitalization. The authors speculated that their results may have been influenced by unsuitable conditions such as differences in baseline medical surveillance and socioeconomic status. Recently, Fang et al. demonstrated that influenza vaccination decreased HF-related hospitalization in elderly patients with chronic renal disease, similar to the study of Kaya et al. [4]. According to recent studies, the mortality benefit of regular influenza vaccination is not clear, but we think that regularly vaccinated HF patients have better outcomes in HF-related hospitalization. A randomized controlled trial was able to show a clear mortality effect of regular vaccination but a randomized study about the benefits of a proven drug is no ethical inconvenience. …