Heart Failure Health Video

Heart failure, or congestive cardiac failure, is the failure of the heart resulting from any structural or functional disorder. Congestive heart failure is the result of many conditions or diseases; learn more about heart failure in this health video.

Take Action

Control your blood pressure
Avoid smoking & other toxic substances
Limit salt & foods with salt
Visit your cardiologist regularly

About this Author

Dr. Dave Weiland has been practicing cardiology in the Bay Area for 21 years. On top of operating a practive in San Pablo, CA for the past 15 years, Dr. Weiland works with eight other doctors in traveling all around the Bay Area to treat patients everywhere. Dr. Weiland graduated from the Ohio State Medical School in 1981; following that with an additional six years of study at Tufts University. Dr. Weiland received his training in cardiology at the New England Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, and now teaches medical students about cardiology.

DAVE WEILAND: Hi. This is Dr. David Weiland. We're going to talk now about heart failure. Heart failure is more of a layman's term because there are many types of heart failure. But when we think of heart failure, we generally think of congestive heart failure or weakening of the heart muscle. The heart muscle, the main pump of the body will often be weakened by many things. These include previous heart attacks, high blood pressure, and toxic substances such as alcohol cocaine or amphetamines. As the heart gets more weakened, the heart no longer maintains the ability to pump blood out to the body. Symptoms of congestive heart failure include extreme shortness of breath especially with minimal exertion, swelling of the ankles with fluid in the ankles, difficulty lying down flat, a symptom that physicians termed orthopnea, and oftentimes, the patients will wake up during the night extremely short of breath with a feeling that they need to rush to an open window to breathe in fresh air. Treatment of heart failure involves the careful guidance of a physician, maximizing blood pressure medications. The medications that we like to use for heart failure include ACE inhibitors, beta blockers, specifically carvedilol, angiotensin receptor blockers in patients who cannot tolerate ACE inhibitors, and oftentimes the use of furosemide, a diuretic which helps reduce fluid retention and salt retention in the body. Prevention of congestive heart is clearly important in the role of treatment of heart failure. In our patients, we really try to keep their blood pressure under good control, and we try to limit the use of salt and salt containing foods. If you have congestive heart failure, it is best if you're under the care of a cardiologist who can monitor the symptoms. Regular echocardiograms can be very useful in the treatment of congestive heart failure to determine if the heart is getting worse. If the heart has reached the certain point of failure, we like to measure the ejection fraction of the heart. The ejection fraction will tell us what percentage of the blood is being pumped out with each heartbeat. When the ejection fraction reaches 35% or less, patients are at risk for sudden cardiac death and in this situation oftentimes, a consideration has to be made for placing an implantable cardiac defibrillator. I would recommend that if you have congestive heart failure you should be under the close observation of a cardiologist.