Undernutrition and Cachexia in Patients with Decompensated Heart Failure and Chagas Cardiomyopathy: Occurrence and Association with Hospital Outcomes

Background: Nutritional disorders are common among patients with heart failure (HF) and associated with poor prognosis. Importantly, some populations of patients, like the ones with Chagas disease, are frequently excluded from most analyses. Objective: We sought to study the occurrence of undemutrition and cachexia in patients with Chagas disease during episodes of decompensated HF (DHF) as compared to other etiologies, and to investigate the influence of these findings on hospital outcomes. Methods: We performed a consecutive case series study with patients hospitalized with DHF. Patients underwent the Subjective Global Assessment of nutritional status (SGA), besides anthropometric and laboratorial measures, and were evaluated for the occurrence of cachexia, low muscle mass and strength. We studied the occurrence of death or urgent heart transplantation during hospitalization. Results: Altogether, 131 patients were analyzed and 42 (32.1%) had Chagas disease. Patients with Chagas disease had lower Body Mass Index (BMI) (22.4 kg/m(2) [19.9-25.3] vs. 23.6 kg/m(2) [20.8-27.3], p=0.03), higher frequency of undemutrition (76.2% vs 55.1%, p=0.015) and higher occurrence of death or transplant (83.3% vs. 41.6%, p<0.001). We found that, in patients with Chagas etiology, the occurrence of death or cardiac transplantation were associated with undernutrition (3 [42.9%] patients with hospital discharge vs 29 [82.9%] patients with death or heart transplant, p=0.043). Conclusions: Taken together, our results indicate that patients with Chagas disease hospitalized with DHF often present with nutritional disorders, especially undernutrition; importantly, this finding was associated with the occurrence of death and heart transplant during hospitalization.