Congestive Heart Failure (or simply Heart Failure) is a condition where the heart is unable to supply the rest of the body’s organs with sufficient quantities of blood. All of your bodies organs need blood to carry in nutrients and carry out waste, and without frequent deliveries and pickups, your organs will stop working the way they’re supposed to.
Heart Failure doesn’t mean the heart stops. It just means the heart isn’t able to keep up with the demands your body is placing on it. This inability to keep up can be caused by several things:
- High blood pressure: if your heart has had to work against the added pressure in your arteries and veins for years, your heart can become weakened and unable to pump blood throughout your body as it used to.
- Narrowed arteries: if your arteries have narrowed due to plaque buildup or some other reason, they may nto be capable of carrying the full volume of blood your body’s organs need. Your heart has to pump more often, which over time makes it weaker.
- Previous heart attack: if you had a previous heart attack there may be dead muscle tissue in your heart, making it less efficient than it was prior to the heart attack.
- Heart defects: hearts that are malformed at birth can cause congestive heart failure.
- Infections of the heart and heart valves.
- Cardiomyopathy: disease of the heart muscle itself.
The reason this condition is called “congestive” is because it’s much like an arterial roadway at rush hour. Because the heart isn’t pushing out as much blood as wants to come in, blood gets backed up, like a congested highway. One of the symptoms of congestive heart failure is swelling in the lower extremities – that’s blood getting backed up in arterial and venous highways. Swelling can happen in other places, too.
Another common symptom is shortness of breath (sob), especially during physical activity. Your body is burning through it’s store of oxygen to do the work you’re asking it to do (such as running on a treadmill), but your heart can’t replace those stores fast enough, putting you in a state of oxygen deficit. This makes you tired, you fatigue easily and you struggle to fill your lungs with as much air as can fit.
The good news is there are many ways to treat CHF. Treatment usually includes modifying what you do at home, such as changing your food intake and losing weight if you’re overweight. There are also medications that can make your heart’s job easier, by dilating (making bigger, expanding) blood vessels, reducing the pressure required to pump blood through your body. They can also improve the pumping function of your heart muscle.
In a worst-case scenario, if congestive heart failure gets so bad that medications and lifestyle changes don’t help, a heart transplant can be considered.
