Approved research

Heart failure, physical activity and risk of adverse clinical events

Lay summary

Heart failure (HF) is a common and serious condition. Limited evidence suggests a link between physical activity (PA) and the likelihood of survival, however previous studies have been limited by size or methods of studying PA. Furthermore, contribution of PA to prediction of incident HF is not known. Research questions: 1) How do PA patterns differ between people with and without HF? 2) Among people with HF, can PA characteristics (with or without other markers) help identify patients at risk of deterioration? 3) Among people without HF, can PA characteristics ( with or without other markers) predict risk of incident HF? The proposed research will provide a deeper understanding of a common serious condition, its association with physical activity (PA) patterns and how those associations may change by other patient features and prior to adverse events. In the future, this understanding could be used to support the development of i) more targeted preventative and treatment strategies and ii) single-point in time (e.g. in hospital) or repeated measure (e.g. through home monitoring system) risk-stratification techniques. We will process raw accelerometer data to extract markers of PA in collaboration with Aiden Doherty (PA expert group). Whilst he is deriving time-domain markers for the entire UK Biobank cohort, we will derive frequency and time-domain markers relevant to our case-control study. Such markers may include dominant frequencies, step-counts, sedentary behaviour. The markers will be extracted for patients with reported HF prior to accelerometer recording and their matched controls to compare patterns of PA between and within groups. Finally, we will develop and validate risk prediction models in patients with or at risk of HF. We require access to data for all the UK Biobank participants who have been subject to at least one accelerometer recording.