Specific Activity Scale Improves the Detection of Symptomatic Chronic Heart Failure Patients

Introduction

Heart failure (HF) is a highly prevalent, complex clinical syndrome, that is associated with significant morbidity and mortality. HF severity can be estimated by the New York Heart Association (NYHA) classification, however, this has several limitations, including high subjectivity, poor reproducibility, and poor correlation with objective physical capacity measures. Recent studies have suggested limitations of the NYHA classification in differentiating asymptomatic patients, with NYHA functional class (FC) I from patients with mild symptoms.^,

The Specific Activity Scale (SAS) is an alternative method to measure functional capacity, by measuring the capacity of patients in performing activities with known oxygen consumption. This method has potentially higher reproducibility and more accurate characterization of physical restriction of HF patients.^,

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