eart failure (HF) is a major and growing public health problem in developed countries. 1 In the United States, approximately 5 million individuals have HF, and more than 550,000 new cases are diagnosed annually. 1 To our knowledge, only a few reports have focused on this issue in Japan. 2,3 The purpose of this study was to estimate the impact of population aging on the number of outpatients with left ventricular dysfunction (LVD) over the next 5 decades in Japan. All study participants provided informed consent and the study design was approved by the ethics review board of Niigata University Graduate School of Medical and Dental sciences.We applied estimated age-, gender-, and conditionspecific prevalences to the projected Japanese population in each age group and gender for the future until 2055, to provide a prospective estimate of the number of these patients. The primary data source was the Sado Heart Failure Study, a hospital-based research project primarily designed to count the number of patients with LVD by total enumeration in all hospitals on the island of Sado. The proportion of echocardiographically diagnosed systolic (SD) and isolated diastolic dysfunction (IDD) patients (together referred to as LVD) in the general population in 2003 4,5 was used as a substitute for the prevalence of LVD in the present study
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