Optimal doses of heart failure medication in women and men: perspective from daily clinical care
Authors: Bots S , Onland-Moret N.C , Tulevski I.I , Somsen G.A , Den Ruijter H.M 
Published: November 2020

Background

Heart failure (HF) guidelines recommend equal target doses for women and men. Recently, these recommendations have been challenged as research suggested that women with HF with reduced Ejection Fraction (HFrEF) may reach optimal treatment effect at half of the guideline-recommended dose while men may require the full dose. However, it is unclear how often women and men reach guideline-recommended target doses in daily practice.

Purpose

To evaluate whether women and men with HF reach guideline-recommended target doses for Angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI)/angiotensin II receptor blocker (ARB), β-blockers (BB) and mineralocorticoid receptor antagonists (MRA) in daily practice.

Methods

We extracted data from 13 outpatient cardiology clinics for all individuals diagnosed with HF within 14 days leading up to their visit who were prescribed at least one guideline-recommended HF medication. HF was defined based on a combination of the cardiologist's diagnosis and left ventricular systolic or diastolic dysfunction determined during echocardiography.

Guideline-recommended medication groups and target doses were taken from the 2016 ESC HF guidelines or from literature for medications not mentioned in the guidelines. To enable comparison between medications and medication groups, daily dose was converted to percentage of target dose. Mean change in percentage of target dose over consecutive medication prescriptions was modelled for men and women using natural cubic splines.

Results

We included 1254 patients with HF (48% women). Women were on average older at diagnosis (71 vs 67 years) and more often had hypertension (54.9 vs 44.3%), but less often had diabetes mellitus (13.5 vs 19.4%), a history of coronary heart disease (7.8 vs 19.6%,) or past cardiovascular interventions (8.7 vs 23.0%) than men. In total, 1069 patients were prescribed an ACEI/ARB (46% women), 920 a BB (48% women) and 243 an MRA (43% women). Women were more often prescribed only one medication than men (39.6 vs 33.2%, p=0.014). Approximately 14% of first prescriptions for all medications were at 100% of target dose or higher for both women and men, with the majority of prescriptions being either at 1–49% of target dose (47.2 vs 45.5%, respectively) or 50–99% of target dose (39.1 vs 40.8%, respectively). The natural cubic splines showed that this distribution did not change over consecutive drug prescriptions in either women or men. Only MRA prescriptions for men showed an upward trend and reached 100% of target dose.

Conclusion

In daily practice, both women and men were unlikely to reach guideline-recommended target doses for both ACEI/ARBs and BBs. For MRAs, women were less likely to reach target dose than men. Optimal dosing in HF is difficult for both sexes, but in light of recent evidence, the challenge in daily practice seems to lie more in undertreatment of men than overtreatment of women.

Figure 1 (women in red, men in blue)

Funding Acknowledgement

Type of funding source: Public Institution(s). Main funding source(s): ZonMw