Recommendations to prevent heart failure

What are the symptoms of this disease?

Signs and symptoms of IC derived mainly from a peculiar characteristic of this disease, which is the tendency to water and salt retention by the body. The symptoms and severity of symptoms differ from one person to another according to the evolutionary stage of their disease, but the most common are fatigue or asthenia, difficulty breathing levels unimportant effort or no effort (dyspnea) and signs derivatives tendency to water and salt retention, such as swelling of limbs or edemas. Characteristically this swelling is not accompanied by signs of inflammation or pain. Dyspnea sometimes is so severe that occurs even at rest and typically while lying down.

In more advanced cases of the disease, complications resulting from inadequate blood supply to vital organs usually appear, including the kidney, which only aggravates the retention of water and salt.

What care should follow a patient with this disease?

They care that patients should continue to sit on five pillars.

1. Poor diet salt: Heart failure is a chronic disease characterized because the body has a permanent tendency to retain water and salt and this has serious consequences for the distribution of water in our body, which tends to accumulate in tissues and viscera, in particular in the lung with consequent risk of developing a serious complication that is the "wet lungs" or pulmonary edema. Therefore, patients should get used to a diet low in salt.

2. Mobilization: The patient with chronic HF that is in a stable situation, you should try to perform light exercise, such as walking on level ground, because it helps to improve functional status and minimizes the risk of loss of muscle mass that is a complication associated with HF.

3. Weight: The patient with heart failure should try to bring their weight to ideal weight. Overweight worse functional status. On the other hand, the HF patient used to monitor their weight daily. In case you notice an increase in unexpected and not attributable to excess intake weight, you must think you are starting to accumulate excess water, weighing one kg each liter, which must inform immediately to your doctor.

4. Control of the underlying disease: Periodic reviews by your Primary Care Physician and / or by your cardiologist will give you information about the course of the underlying disease and allow adjustments to whet drug treatment.

5. Drugs: In the last 4 decades we have witnessed spectacular advances in the treatment of HF by applying new drugs that have allowed the mortality is reduced by this cause and that many patients have experienced a reduction in morbidity , have been improved functional capacity and quality of life. Patients should know that each of the drugs that are prescribed to combat this powerful enemy is the IC, but that the fight from different sides and which act synergistically including. Hence the importance of the patient adequately take the medication that is prescribed. Nevertheless, despite the great progress made, there is still a long way to go, especially because the mechanisms of the disease, which we call the pathophysiology is still far from clear in almost half of cases of patients from this disease.

Meanwhile they continue developing new treatment alternatives such as surgical procedures or electronic devices to resynchronize the heart or heart assist, but are applicable to a small number of patients.