Epidemiology of Heart Failure in Europe.

Heart failure (HF) is a major public health problem. For acute HF, therapeutic developments have been scarce in the past decades. In contrast to acute HF, chronic HF was the object of several successful controlled studies conducted in the past 30 years, which encouraged the use of drugs and devices able to improve the outcomes of ambulatory patients. For both patients with acute and chronic HF, observational research remains an important research tool to confirm the results of the controlled trials in the real world, to collect periodic reports, and to assess the quality-of-care indicators.