Search

Background Environmental health risks for individuals with heart failure (HF) have been inadequately studied, as these individuals are not well represented in traditional cohort studies. To address this we studied associations between long-term air pollution exposure and mortality in HF patients. Methods and Results The study population was a hospital-based cohort of individuals diagnosed with HF between July 1, 2004 and December 31, 2016 compiled using electronic health records. Individuals were followed from 1 year after initial diagnosis until death or the end of the observation period (December 31, 2016). We used Cox proportional hazards models to evaluate the association of annual average fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ) exposure at the time of initial HF diagnosis with all-cause mortality, adjusted for age, race, sex, distance to the nearest air pollution monitor, and socioeconomic status indicators. Among 23 302 HF patients, a 1 μg/m 3 increase in annual average PM 2.5 was associated with an elevated risk of all-cause mortality (hazard ratio 1.13; 95% CI, 1.10-1.15). As compared with people with exposures below the current national PM 2.5 exposure standard (12 μg/m 3 ), those with elevated exposures experienced 0.84 (95% CI, 0.73-0.95) years of life lost over a 5-year period, an observation that persisted even for those residing in areas with PM 2.5 concentrations below current standards. Conclusions Residential exposure to elevated concentrations of PM 2.5 is a significant mortality risk factor for HF patients. Elevated PM 2.5 exposures result in substantial years of life lost even at concentrations below current national standards.

Objective: Querying electronic health records (EHRs) to find patients meeting study criteria is an efficient method of identifying potential study participants. We aimed to measure the effectiveness of EHR-driven recruitment in the context of ADAPTABLE (Aspirin Dosing: A Patient-centric Trial Assessing Benefits and Long-Term Effectiveness)-a pragmatic trial aiming to recruit 15 000 patients., Materials and Methods: We compared the participant yield of 4 recruitment methods: in-clinic recruitment by a research coordinator, letters, direct email, and patient portal messages. Taken together, the latter 2 methods comprised our EHR-driven electronic recruitment workflow., Results: The electronic recruitment workflow sent electronic messages to 12 254 recipients; 13.5% of these recipients visited the study website, and 4.2% enrolled in the study. Letters were sent to 427 recipients; 5.6% visited the study website, and 3.3% enrolled in the study. Coordinators recruited 339 participants in clinic; 23.6% visited the study website, and 16.8% enrolled in the study. Five-hundred-nine of the 580 UNC enrollees (87.8%) were recruited using an electronic method., Discussion: Electronic recruitment reached a wide net of patients, recruited many participants to the study, and resulted in a workflow that can be reused for future studies. In-clinic recruitment saw the highest yield, suggesting that a combination of recruitment methods may be the best approach. Future work should account for demographic skew that may result by recruiting from a pool of patient portal users., Conclusion: The success of electronic recruitment for ADAPTABLE makes this workflow well worth incorporating into an overall recruitment strategy, particularly for a pragmatic trial.