Symptoms of heart failure in chronic form, diagnosis of the disease

All over the world, including in countries with a high standard of living, there is a very large percentage of people who, to varying degrees, have health problems, including heart disease. Increasingly, doctors observe symptoms of heart failure in their patients, a disease that is usually chronic and quite dangerous for health, and most importantly, human life.

Each of us has heard many stories about the loss of life, including famous people, because of this ailment. But how to avoid it, what are the main causes of heart failure, can this problem be avoided?

The most common cause of a disease such as heart failure is the narrowing of those arteries that are responsible for supplying the heart muscle itself with oxygen and nutrients. Despite the fact that diseases associated with blood vessels, as practice shows, are manifested at a relatively young age, heart failure is diagnosed, as a rule, already in elderly people. It can be noted that the diagnosis of heart failure reveals symptoms in a greater number of cases in women, but the reason for this lies solely in the fact that men do not survive banally, dying from all sorts of vascular diseases, for example, myocardial infarction.

It is rapid fatigue and weakness, in fact, are the first bells, the first obvious, it is possible to say, palpable symptoms of heart failure. The reason for this feeling in the patient is to reduce the blood flow, the volume of blood that can "surpass" the heart. The remaining blood accumulates in the so-called sludge or "depot".They are located in a person in the abdominal cavity, as well as in the veins of the lower extremities, incidentally, swelling of the legs and bloating of the veins - a clear sign that it would be good to visit a cardiologist.

Among other things, the symptoms of heart failure include a seemingly not quite related component, like shortness of breath. The fact is that with a decrease in blood flow, the fluid accumulates not only in the extremities or the liver, but also in the lungs, which in turn makes it difficult for oxygen to access the capillaries that feed the lungs, making it difficult for the latter to work. As a variant of manifestation of this symptom in everyday life are episodes when a patient can wake up at night with obvious signs of suffocation. History knows that the patient with heart failure famous President Roosevelt was sleeping in a sitting position in his chair, as he suffered frequent attacks of suffocation. In extremely severe cases, a borderline condition may occur, such as pulmonary edema, which is fraught with a fatal outcome.

It is clear that you can not make a diagnosis yourself without being an expert, only in the above cases is it impossible, and even more so to deal with such ungrateful work as self-medication. You should immediately contact a specialist. The diagnostic procedure will begin in this case with listening with a stethoscope in order to detect noise in the lungs due to possible accumulated fluid, as well as auscultation of the heart and valves. One of the most striking features for a specialist, due to the symptoms of heart failure, is, of course, blueing of the extremities. Naturally, the electronic means of medicine are actively used in the diagnosis of this disease. First of all, they include cardiographs, echocardiographs, radionuclide cardiographs and other technical means.

Heart failure is a serious disease, but the right way of life and preventive measures will help to prevent it, thereby prolonging a person's full life.