Self-awareness of heart failure in the oldest old–an observational study of participants, ≥ 80 years old, with an objectively verified heart failure

The prevalence of heart failure (HF) increases with age [1] and is as high as 22 % among the oldest old, i.e., people older than 80 [2]. Elderly individuals with HF are high consumers of healthcare, and poor HF-specific self-care is one of the primary reasons for hospitalisation [3]. One of the primary tasks of nurses is to ensure that the person they care for has the ability to conduct HF-specific self-care, and educational interventions conducted by nurses have been proven to improve such self-care in elderly HF patients [4]. However, the components that enable the elderly to engage in this specific self-care have yet to be determined [5].

For elderly individuals to conduct HF-specific self-care, a prerequisite is that the elderly individual is self-aware of having HF, i.e., the patient has been informed about the diagnosis and the information has been understood. Previous studies [6‐8] that examined the prevalence of self-awareness of HF among patients over 45 years of age with HF found the prevalence to be between 25-46 %. Halling and Berglund [7] defined HF based on diagnosis by a primary care physician, regardless of if any objective examinations were the basis for the diagnosis or not. The risk is, therefore, that elderly were erroneously included or excluded in that study. Furthermore, Gure and colleagues [6] defined HF through Medicare claims, and, as the authors themselves noted, there is a financial incentive for healthcare systems to report HF-diagnoses to Medicare, even in cases in which an elderly patient has not been diagnosed with HF; i.e., participants in their study may have been incorrectly defined as having HF. Okura and colleagues [8] chose to examine both outpatient and inpatient medical records. A participant in the study by Okura et al. [8] was considered to have HF if the HF diagnosis was validated with two major criteria or one major and two minor criteria developed by the Framingham Heart Study [9]. According to the European Society of Cardiology (ESC) guidelines [10], HF is a syndrome and a diagnosis of it must be based on clinical signs and symptoms (i.e., dyspnoea, oedema or fatigue) in conjunction with an objective verification. Thus, an HF diagnosis should be verified with an electrocardiogram (ECG) and echocardiography or chest X-ray, and preferably also by measuring plasma concentrations of natriuretic peptides. Because none of the above-mentioned studies [6‐8] used the ESC guidelines’ recommendations, the potential for selection bias may be present in all three studies. Thus, because of methodological issues in previous studies, some uncertainty remains regarding the prevalence of self-awareness of own HF diagnosis. Because the oldest old is the age group with the highest percentage of HF, this age group should be given priority when self-awareness of own HF-diagnosis is researched.

Self-awareness of having a particular illness is arguably crucial to make adequate health decisions and self-awareness may, therefore, be seen as a part of the individual’s health literacy. Thus, self-awareness should not only be influenced by how health information is communicated by the health care professionals [11], but also by age-related factors, such as cognitive impairment, dependency in daily functioning and depression [12‐15]. HF-related factors that could be expected to be related to self-awareness of own HF diagnosis ought to be the severity of the illness [6], i.e., functional capacity in relation to HF-symptoms. There should also be a relationship between the time span linking the date of the HF diagnosis to the date of the questioning, if the patient is aware.

In summary, to conduct HF-specific self-care, a self-awareness of own HF diagnosis needs to be present. There is a lack of studies that have investigated the prevalence of self-awareness of own HF diagnosis in the oldest old with an objectively verified HF, as well as factors associated with this self-awareness. Our hypothesis is that the prevalence of self-awareness of own HF diagnosis is low in the oldest old and that there is a relationship between this self-awareness and age- and HF-related factors. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the prevalence of self-awareness of one’s own HF and the association of age-and HF-related factors in people 80 years of age or older with objectively verified HF.

Out of 265 SNAC-B participants with a HF diagnosis in their inpatient record, 62 (23.4 %) were too ill for inclusion in the study, or died before self-awareness of their HF diagnosis could be established. Another 113 were excluded due to other reasons, detailed in Fig. 1. Ultimately, a total of 90 participants were included in our study. Neither gender differences nor differences in age at HF diagnosis were found between the excluded and the included individuals with HF (p = 0.186/0.730).

An average of 18.4 months (SD 14.6) passed between the date of the HF diagnosis and the date of the survey. The average age of the participants at the time of HF diagnosis was 85.9 years old (SD 4.9) and the majority of the participants were women (63.3 %). Physical and mental impairments were common, and 7 (8.5 %) lived in a sheltered accommodation. Impaired cognitive ability was found in 57 (63.3 %) participants, and 17 (18.9 %) were moderately/severely cognitively impaired. Two of these had so profound cognitive impairments that they received help from their spouses to answer the questions in the survey. Almost 30 % had a risk of depression, highly reduced functional capacity (NYHA III-IV) was present in 28 (31.3 %) of the participants, and 30 (33.7 %) had a severe or total need of assistance in their daily functioning.

The most striking result of our study was that only a small percentage of the oldest old were aware of their diagnosis of HF. Our findings are consistent with previous studies [6‐8] with different study designs, different age cohorts, and larger study populations. Thus, it appears that most individuals with HF are not aware that they have HF, including the oldest old. However, almost 20 % of the participants were moderately/severely cognitively impaired. This fact should have an impact on the result, especially since only two of the participants had the help of their spouses to answer the questionnaires. However, the logistic regression analysis (Table 2, Model 2) demonstrated that the degree of cognitive functioning did not have any impact on whether self-awareness of one’s own HF diagnosis was present or not. The non-significant results could, however, be a reflection of a small sample size. Nevertheless, the univariate analyses (Table 1) revealed an absence of a tendency for significant findings, and the study would have needed to be up to 30 times larger to reach significance in all of the included variables. Furthermore, even if the small differences in cognitive functioning that were made visible between the groups were significant, the clinical relevance of these findings could be questioned. Additionally, Gure and colleagues’ [6] included approximately 5600 elderly people in their study, and they also found that the degree of cognitive functioning was not related to self-awareness of one’s own HF diagnosis, as was shown in our study. Thus, the degree of cognitive functioning should have a minor impact on whether the oldest old with HF are self-aware of their own HF diagnosis or not, as was shown by our study.

According to Riegel, Dickson, and Faulkner [27], HF-specific self-care can be explained by the theory of naturalistic decision making (NDM). This theory explains human decision making in real life, and depends on the interaction between the decision-making person, the problem and the environment. The authors further reveal how several actors (both the ill person and health professionals) interact in most NDM situations and that the level of interest and commitment can vary between these two actors [27]. The manner in which health professionals provide information about the HF diagnosis (i.e., an environmental factor) can thus affect whether the ill person is aware of the diagnosis or not as well as if HF-specific self-care is conducted or not. Imprecise expressions such as “a bad heart” and “ventricular dysfunction” are often used by health professionals, when informing of HF diagnosis [28, 29], and the prevalence of self-awareness had probably been increased if more imprecise paraphrases of the term “heart failure” had been included in the HF-questionnaire. However, when health professionals use complex terminology, people with HF lose interest in the information provided [29], and the usage of euphemisms when informing patients about HF could be perceived as not recognising the severity of the illness, which may undermine the importance of conducting HF-specific self-care. Thus, the health professionals’ usage of the specific term “heart failure” when informing about the diagnosis should be regarded as an important factor for a successful NDM process and the conductance of HF-specific self-care. This assumption should therefore be further explored.

One of the strengths of the present study is that the study population was drawn from a large, representative, population-based study, with low internal loss of the studied variables. Thus, the results should be considered generalisable to the oldest old with HF. However, despite telephone calls to encourage participation in the study, 73/163 were never examined. Though, only 11 of these dropped out as a result of refusal. The majority (85 %) dropped out because they considered themselves to be too ill or were already deceased (Fig. 1). We chose to study the oldest old with HF, an elderly cohort known with high morbidity and mortality [30]. Consequently, the study’s generalisability to those oldest old who are very old or very morbid at HF diagnosis may be compromised. This, however, underscores the difficulty of studying the oldest old with HF. The chosen study design (to include study participants over a long period of time) has been used before [17], and increased the study population.

Additionally, the participants with HF had their diagnosis objectively verified. This ensures that the participants studied actually had HF. However, the excluded participants who had a non-objectively verified HF diagnosis (20 %) may well have had more HF markers (i.e., higher NYHA classification, higher dependency in daily functioning, etc.). An experienced physician may, therefore, have chosen to diagnose HF without conducting an objective verification, which would have led the participant to be wrongly excluded from our study. It could, therefore, be argued that the results may not be generalisable to individuals with more HF markers. However, the results of our study indicate that HF markers had no association with self-awareness of own HF diagnosis, indicating that the results should be generalisable also to the more seriously ill.

There are probably factors that, in conjunction with the manner in which the information of the HF diagnosis is communicated, can be related to the awareness of one’s own HF diagnosis. The psychological aspect of who/what the individual believes is responsible for their personal health, e.g., Health Locus of Control (HLOC) [31], may perhaps have a relationship with the self-awareness of the presence of HF. Initially, we included HLOC, but due to high internal dropouts, HLOC was later excluded. In our study, HLOC was completed independently by the participant, which may be difficult for the cognitively impaired. Most of our participants were cognitively impaired, which could explain the high internal dropout rate. This fact further illustrates the difficulty in studying the oldest old with HF. However, by the use of the study design presented herein, we managed to establish the relationship between self-awareness of one’s own HF diagnosis and those interpersonal factors that are typically studied in HF trials.

There is a low prevalence of self-awareness of HF in the oldest old. Factors that could be linked to elderly with HF were found to have no association with this awareness. Thus, external circumstances such as the manner in which the elderly patients are informed about HF, in conjunction with interpersonal factors not covered by the present study, may have a higher impact on the self-awareness of own HF diagnosis than the age- and HF-related factors investigated in this study. This relationship should therefore be further investigated.