Prediction of mortality in patients with heart failure and systolic dysfunction.

Systolic heart failure has a highly variable mortality that can be altered with medications and cardiac devices. This review focuses on recently published predictive models in heart failure. These models may help with difficult decisions such as listing for cardiac transplantation, selecting cardiac devices, and making end-of-life decisions. We discuss systolic heart failure risk models to estimate short- (30-day to 1-year) and longer-term (1- to 5-year) mortality in hospitalized and ambulatory heart failure patients.