There is a strong link between heart disease and kidney disease, and the two influence each other, which has long been a concern by the medical community [12, 13]. The first mention of cardiorenal syndrome (CRS) was in 1913, when Thomas Lewis proposed the presence of a close relationship between the heart and the kidney [14]. Since then, much progress has been made in the pathogenesis, classification, and treatment of cardiorenal syndrome. In 2008, under the initiative of Ronco et al. [15], the Acute Disease Quality Initiative (ADQI) working group proposed the first consensus on the definition and classification of CRS. CRS often coexists with anemia, which leads to reciprocal and progressive cardiac and renal deterioration. The triad of heart failure, chronic kidney disease, and anemia is termed cardiorenal anemia syndrome (CRAS).
CRAS is considerably prevalent, and the management of patients with CRAS remains a challenging undertaking worldwide because of the complexity and heterogeneity of this syndrome and the lack of evidence-based clinical guidelines. At present, CRAS is common in patients with HF and is an independent predictor of all-cause mortality [3], but few studies have reported the clinical features of CRAS and its prognostic factors. Therefore, this study focused on describing the baseline characteristics of patients with CRAS and the influencing factors of their prognosis. We compared the baseline characteristics of the patients with CRAS according to their NYHA functional class and found that there were significant differences in gender, age, diabetes mellitus, atrial fibrillation, edema, dialysis, SCr, NT-proBNP, patient survival months, and mortality between the three groups (P < 0.05). Although there was no relationship between gender and prognosis after multivariate adjustment, there was a significant difference in gender between the three groups, which is an interesting phenomenon. Marta et al. found sex-related differences in patients with cardiorenal syndrome. More advanced kidney disease, anemia, and an increased prevalence of preserved ejection fraction are more common in women with CRS, whereas heart failure with reduced ejection fraction was more frequently observed in men [16]. It has been found that CRAS is associated with increasing age and diabetes mellitus [3], which is similar to our research, and we found that with the increase of NYHA functional class, the proportion of CRAS patients with diabetes mellitus and age increased. Diabetes mellitus is also a major risk factor for the development of coronary artery disease and HF [17, 18], and diabetes mellitus is the most common cause of CKD in Western countries and China [19]. Moreover, as the NYHA functional class increased, the proportion of edema, atrial fibrillation, and NT-proBNP values were higher, while the LVEF values were lower, indicating that CRAS patients had more severe HF or other cardiovascular diseases. NT-proBNP is associated with HF NYHA functional class, LVEF, and ventricular pressure, thereby contributing to prognosis and risk classification in patients with HF [20]. Moreover, NT-proBNP is associated with renal insufficiency and is more sensitive in predicting cardiovascular and all-cause mortality in patients with CKD [21].
The development of CRAS is multifactorial, and some risk factors have been recognized. Advanced age, diabetes mellitus, ischaemic etiology, NYHA functional class, and LVEF are independently associated with CRAS in patients with HF [2, 5]. Most studies have explored the effect of the presence or absence of CRAS on prognosis in patients with HF, and few studies have described the prognostic factors of CRAS itself, whether it is HF, renal insufficiency, anemia, or others. Therefore, this article found that age, smoking history, cerebral infarction, NYHA functional class, albumin, SCr, LVEDD, and LVEF were closely related to the risk of death in patients with CRAS (P < 0.05). In addition, We further compared survival of patients with CRAS in three groups by the Kaplan-Meier curve, which showed that the higher NYHA functional class, the worse the prognosis of patients with CRAS. All these indicated that HF plays an important role in the prognosis factors of CRAS.
Next, we used ROC analysis to compare the values of different parameters in the prognosis of CRAS patients, and we found that the AUC value of age was the largest (AUC = 0.709). Undoubtedly, advanced age is a prognostic risk factor for heart failure and chronic kidney disease, and Domenico et al. also found that age was independently related to CRAS (P < 0.001) [5]. Likewise, cigarette smoking has been identified as an independent risk factor for cardiovascular events and incident CKD [22, 23], which is similar to our conclusions, and we found that smoking history is an independent risk factor for the prognosis of CRAS patients. We also found cerebral infarction, albumin, and SCr were closely related to the risk of death in patients with CRAS. Cerebrovascular disease and cardiovascular disease not only have similarities in the occurrence and development of diseases, such as cerebral infarction and myocardial infarction, but also have a high overlap rate in the affected population. Albumin has anti-inflammatory, antioxidant, and antithrombotic properties [24]. Hypoalbuminemia is a strong predictor of increased all-cause and cardiovascular mortality based on several cohort studies and meta-analyses [16, 25–27]. Pedro et al. explored the survival rates of HF patients with CRAS in Tanzania and found that renal dysfunction was a predictor of mortality [4], which is consistent with our conclusions.
Patients with CKD and HF have an increased risk of anemia. The presence of anemia increases in parallel with the severity of HF, the CKD stage, and the patients' age, while the treatment of anemia leads to an improvement in cardiac and renal function as well as fewer hospitalizations for HF [28]. Here, we found that anemia in CRAS patients was not related to prognosis, either because these patients were treated aggressively or because of sample size.