Two out of 5 people with heart failure are more likely to die because they aren’t regularly seeing a cardiologist, a new study says.

The 3 in 5 heart failure patients who do see a cardiologist once a year have a 24% lower risk of death, researchers report in the European Heart Journal.

“In patients with heart failure, the heart is unable to normalize blood flow and pressure,” said lead researcher Dr. Guillaume Baudry of the Nancy University Hospital’s Clinical Investigation Center in France.

“Heart failure can’t usually be cured, but with the right treatment, symptoms can often be controlled for many years,” he said in a news release.

“Our findings highlight the potential value of specialist follow-up, even in patients who appear clinically stable,” Baudry added. “Patients should feel encouraged to ask for a cardiology review, particularly if they have recently been in hospital or they are taking diuretics.”

For the study, researchers reviewed records for all French patients living with heart failure in January 2020 who had been diagnosed in the previous five years, nearly 656,000 people in all.

Researchers found that 40% of patients did not see a cardiologist annually.

Further, those who did see a cardiologist were less likely to die or be hospitalized with heart failure during the following year.

One visit a year cut heart failure patients’ overall risk of death from 13% to nearly 7%, results show.

Two to three visits per year would produce even better benefits for:

• People taking diuretics, lowering their death risk from over 21% to 12%.

• Patients who’d been hospitalized within the past five years, dropping death risk from 25% to 13%.

For patients who did see a heart specialist, four appointments seemed optimal, lowering death risk from 34% to 18%.

“There could be many reasons why heart failure patients do not see a cardiologist,” senior researcher Nicolas Girerd of Nancy University Hospital said in a news release. “For example, we know that older people and women are less likely to see a cardiologist.”

“We found that patients with another chronic condition, such as diabetes or a lung condition, were also less likely to see a cardiologist,” Girerd added. “These differences have been found in many countries around the world.”