Objectives: The authors sought to describe characteristics, treatments, and in-hospital outcomes of hospitalized heart failure (HF) patients stratified by etiology.

Background: Whether characteristics and outcomes of HF patients differ by cardiomyopathy etiology is unknown.

Methods: The authors analyzed data on 156,013 hospitalized HF patients from 319 U.S. hospitals participating in Get With The Guidelines-HF between 2005 and 2013. Characteristics, treatments, and in-hospital outcomes were assessed by HF etiology. Standard regression techniques adjusted for site and patient-level characteristics were used to examine association between HF etiology and in-hospital outcomes.

Results: Median age was 75 years, 69.2% were white, and 49.5% were women. Overall, 92,361 patients (59.2%) had ischemic cardiomyopathy and 63,652 patients (40.8%) had nonischemic cardiomyopathy (NICM). Hypertensive (n = 28,141; 48.5%) and idiopathic (n = 17,808; 30.7%) cardiomyopathies accounted for the vast majority of NICM patients. Post-partum (n = 209; 0.4%), viral (n = 447; 0.8%), chemotherapy (n = 721; 1.2%), substance abuse (n = 2,653; 4.6%), familial (n = 556; 1.0%), and other (n = 7,523; 13.0%) etiologies were far less frequent. There were significant differences in baseline characteristics between those with ischemic cardiomyopathy compared with NICM with respect to age (76 years vs. 72 years), sex (44.4% vs. 56.9% women), and ejection fraction (38% vs. 45%). Risk-adjusted quality of care provided to eligible patients varied minimally by etiology. Similarly, in-hospital mortality did not differ among ischemic compared with NICM patients. However, among NICM patients, only hypertensive cardiomyopathy had a lower mortality rate compared with idiopathic NICM (adjusted odds ratio: 0.83; 95% confidence interval: 0.71 to 0.97).

Conclusions: Characteristics of hospitalized HF patients vary by etiology. Both risk-adjusted quality of care and in-hospital outcomes did not differ by etiology.