Validity of Scales to Assess Severity in Acute Heart Failure

The scales measuring the severity of acute decompensate heart failure (ADHF) in emergency departments have not achieved an adequate discriminative ability for decision making. Objectives: 1) Identify baseline variables, and evolutionary variables that may provide a good predictive ability of the model.2) Create and validate clinical predictive rules of mortality during admission/a week after ED visit in those discharged from ED, 30 and 60 days after ED visit as well as identify predicitive factors of short-term readmission (90 days)Design: Prospective cohort study. The sociodemographics and clinical variables will be collected from emergency medical records to identify predictors. Outcome variables and evolution of variables will be collected from hospital medical records / ambulatory during admission and up to 90 days after the episode of ADHF. Baseline predictors and evolutionary variables will be identified through logistic regression models using 60% of the final sample. The models that best fit will be applied in 40% of the sample to assess the predictive validity of this scale.