Clinical Practice in Treatment of Chronic Cardiac Failure by General Practitioners in the Czech and Slovak Republic as Compared with Europe. Analysis of the ProgrammeIMPROVEMENT of HF

Overview

Clinical Practice in the Diagnosis and Treatment of Chronic Heart Failure in the Czech andSlovak Republic is Comparable with the European Standard incl. Shortcomings.The European programme IMPROVEMENT of HF concentrated on assembling data on thediagnosis and treatment of chronic cardiac failure in the practice of general practitioners.The investigation took place in 10 centres, incl. 7 on the CR and 3 in the SR. The investigationcomprised 94 general practitioners, incl. 26 from the Slovak Republic and 70 from the CzechRepublic.Fromthe records of every GP perspectively 9 consecutive patients were selected, incl. 6 patientswith the diagnosis of heart failure and 3 after acute myocardial infarction. From the thusassembled group of patients only those were eliminated marked as NYHA I by the physicians.The subject of the work was to compare the standard of treatment of chronic heart failure inthe Czech and Slovak Republics with the position in Europe.Treatment of chronic heart failure by GPs in our country is not worse than in Europe.As regardssome drugs it is even slightly better than the European average. In Europe there are markedregional differences in the treatment of chronic heart failure.Treatment with beta-blocking agents and in particular a combination of ACE inhibitors withbeta-blocking agents appears inadequate.By this effective combination only one fifth of patientswith chronic heart failure is treated in Europe and one quarter of patients in this country.

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