Routine laboratory parameters, medications and sex related with anaemia in acute heart failure

Objective: To investigate the relation of medication and routine laboratory parameters with anaemia in acute heart failure (AHF).Method: 234 AHF patients were enrolled in the study. Those with comorbidities leading to anaemia, and those receiving blood transfusion and antianaemic treatment were excluded. Anaemic and non-anaemic AHF patients were compared in terms of demographics, medication use for 3 months prior to hospitalisation, transthoracic echocardiography, haemogram, sCRP, erythrocyte sedimentation rate, proBNP, d-dimer and biochemistry analyses. In addition, haemosiderinuria, reticulocyte count and direct Coombs test were performed in randomly selected 50 patients among the participants. All variables that were found to be significantly different between the anaemic and non-anaemic group were subjected to binary logistic regression analysis (BLRA).Results: The results of BLRA showed that anaemia was seen 4.2 folds less in digoxin users; whereas it was increased in patients have the following conditions by the number of folds indicated in parenthesis: female gender (2.6 folds), calcium channel blocker (CCB) use (2.6), chronic renal failure (3.1), lower serum AST (3.6), lower corrected serum calcium (3), lower LDL cholesterol (2.6), lower mean corpuscular volume (MCV) (2.5), lower mean corpuscular hemoglobin concentration (MCHC) (2.5), higher magnesemia (2.6), higher proBNP (3.5 folds). Haemosiderinuria was positive in 13 patients and was insignificantly more frequent in the anaemic group.Conclusion: Digoxin use, CCB use, lower corrected calcium, higher magnesemia, lower serum AST and lower LDL cholesterol are parameters emerging in our study associated with anaemia in AHF and which have not been reported so far. The contribution of chronic intravascular haemolysis to anaemia might also deserve to be investigated.Keywords: Heart failure, anaemia