Prognosis of patients with heart failure compared with common types of cancer.

Heart failure (HF) is a growing epidemic that not only exerts an enormous burden on the healthcare system but also imparts extremely poor quality of life in the increasing number of patients dying from this fatal syndrome. For the majority of these patients, end-of-life care is clearly suboptimal. It is within this context that this article reviews the case for comparing the prognosis of HF with that of the most common types of cancer. It also summarizes the numerous difficulties in trying to make such comparisons and highlights key comparative data--the majority of which indicate that the prognosis of HF is comparable with that of cancer. Finally, it discusses how these comparisons can highlight the need to extend the type of public health response to HF usually reserved for high profile disease states, such as cancer.