A Novel Treatment Score (QUAD score) to Promote Treatment Optimization in Heart Failure with a Reduced Ejection Fraction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
AIMS: To help avoid therapeutic inertia, we developed a pragmatic treatment score (QUAD Score) for use in daily practice by healthcare professionals managing patients with a left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) < 50% and heart failure. We now investigate the association between achieved QUAD scores and 1 year outcomes. METHODS: This was a multicentre cohort study in consecutive patients with incident heart failure and LVEF <50%, who completed therapy titration between January 2021 and June 2023. The primary outcome was a composite of first hospitalization for heart failure (HHF) and all-cause mortality at 1 year after final therapy titration, for QUAD scores that were poor (<8), good (8-14) or excellent (15-24). RESULTS: Data were analysed from 1691 participants, collected from 10 UK centres, of whom 30% were women and 82% were White. Median age, N terminal pro-B-type natriuretic peptide (NTproBNP) and LVEF were 70 (59-78.5) years, 1624 (536-4138) ng/L and 34 (25-38) %, respectively. At the start of therapy titration, only 97 (5%) patients were naïve to any of the four pillars of therapy. After investigator-declared final titration, QUAD scores were excellent in 806 (48%), good in 382 (22%) and poor in 503 (30%) patients. Patients who failed eventually to achieve a good or excellent QUAD score were more often women, older and had poorer renal function and higher plasma NTproBNP (P < 0.01). The median number of days to final therapy titration was longer in those who achieved an excellent QUAD score, [174 (99-290) days,133 (80-232) days and 108 (57-193) days P < 0.01, for excellent, good and poor QUAD groups, respectively. There was wide variation in titration schedules across participating centres and overall, 33% of patients completed therapy titration within 90 days, 63% within 6 months and 88% within 1 year. The primary composite outcome at 1 year for those with poor, good and excellent QUAD scores were respectively 16.9%, 9.4% and 5.6%, (log rank P < 0.01), for mortality were 13.1%, 6.5% and 2.4% (log rank P < 0.001) and for first HHF were 7.7%, 3.9% and 3.2% (log rank P < 0.001). CONCLUSIONS: The QUAD score is a simple tool that can help audit and incentivize uptake of guideline-recommended therapy for HFrEF and prevent treatment inertia. Excellent QUAD scores are associated with better outcomes.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".