National and subnational burden of mental disorders in China, 1990-2023: a systematic analysis of the Global Burden of Disease Study 2023.

LVAD implantation has revolutionized the management of advanced heart failure, transforming the prognosis of patients once limited to transplant candidacy or palliative therapy. While survival benefits are well-established, functional and psychosocial outcomes remain equally critical determinants of post-implant quality of life. It is consistently associated with significant improvements in physical function, symptom burden, and patient-reported quality of life for patients with advanced heart failure, supporting its role in both prolonging survival and enhancing daily living and psychosocial well-being. These benefits are most pronounced with newer-generation devices and in well-selected patient populations, though adverse events and complications remain important considerations. Despite the mentioned gains of survival and improvement in quality of life with LVADs, there remains a delay in referring suitable patients to LVAD centers due in part to a lack of awareness about the quality of life gains that are related to LVAD use. Much of the existing functional and patient-reported outcome data in this field derive from earlier-generation continuous-flow devices or from large registry and clinical-trial populations treated at high-volume academic centers. The present study adds to this literature by reporting contemporary, real-world outcomes from an exclusively HeartMate 3 cohort managed in a community hospital setting, in patients who received the device predominantly as destination therapy (95%) and were largely INTERMACS profile II–III at implantation. By pairing several complementary, validated instruments—the KCCQ-12, EQ-5D-3L, EQ-VAS, and 6MWD—with patient-reported psychosocial measures such as health-related stress, treatment satisfaction, social engagement, and cognitive performance, it provides a multidimensional characterization of one-year recovery in precisely the type of patient and care setting that is increasingly common yet under-represented in the current functional-recovery literature. This was a retrospective, single-center cohort of 41 consecutive adults implanted with HeartMate 3 LVADs between February 2022 and October 2024 at Bethesda North Hospital (a 440-bed community hospital serving the Greater Cincinnati Region) and Thomas Comprehensive Care Center (an ambulatory care facility with special emphasis on cardiovascular care). De-identified data were abstracted from the EMR using standardized forms per the protocol.