CHAPTER 3.3 166 deaths found 56% of patients died of cardiovascular causes within a year from index hospitalisation, with the leading cause being HF (21.1%) (Figure 4). Cardiovascular mortality rates have been decreasing by two percent per calendar year, with adjusted p trend=0.001 (Supplementary table 3). Despite this decline, a corresponding increase in non-cardiovascular mortality with time resulted in the unchanged overall rates for one-year mortality and a look into the specific causes between two calendar year periods for 2007- 2008 and 2012-2013 showed that the contribution of infections as a cause of non-cardiovascular deaths has been increasing (Supplementary table 4). When the definition of incident HF hospitalisation was increased from a twoyear to three -year lookback period, the percentage of reduction in false positives were between 1.7 to 3% annually. Nevertheless, the magnitude of outcome rates, trends and statistical significance of regression estimates were similar to the main results, for both the one-year and three-year definitions of incident hospitalisations (Supplementary Tables 5 and 6).
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