Tag: ischemic heart disease

How Doctors are Using Their Skills to Combat Congestive Heart

How Doctors are Using Their Skills to Combat Congestive Heart Failure

Congestive heart failure is an insidious opponent, possessing a slow onset that results in a patient often not even noticing they are having symptoms. Over time the patient will suffer from worsening dyspnea and edema that will eventually drive them to seek treatment, where they will discover that for whatever reason their heart is no longer able to function properly.

Heart failure occurs when the cells of the heart tissue are either destroyed or made non-functional due to another cardiac event, often secondary to ischemic heart disease or coronary artery disease. As a result, the heart is no longer able to pump the blood throughout the body properly; instead the blood pools, resulting in fluids being retained rather than excreted properly and oxygen starved organs being unable to function. The death of these cells is critical because, like brain cells, once the cells of the heart die the body is unable to reproduce them and restore full function to the heart. Congestive heart failure carries with it a high mortality rate, with over fifty percent of its victims dying within five years of being diagnosed. Doctors and researchers are able to use modern advancements in medicine to make the patient more comfortable and, in many cases, to provide them with a more favorable prognosis.

Many patients do not even discover that they have suffered heart failure until they are brought into the Emergency Department of their local hospital complaining of chest pain and difficulty breathing. Doctors will stabilize them there, giving them supplemental oxygen and beginning a course of medicinal treatment that will carry them out of the hospital.

Modern science has provided physicians with a wide array of methods with which to combat the damage done by congestive heart failure. Once oxygen is returned to an acceptable level a physician will usually administer a diuretic to stimulate the renal system to pull fluid out of circulation, relieving the edema and taking a great of stress off of the lungs, heart and other organs. This will also usually be accompanied by supplemental potassium, as the renal system will remove potassium along with the excess fluid and hypokalemia carries with it its own hazards.

A great deal of attention in the field of medicine has been focused on the body’s production of angiotensin II as it aggravates congestive heart failure. Angiotensin II is a substance produced by the body which raises blood pressure and causes the blood vessels to constrict, thereby forcing the heart to work much harder to pump blood throughout the body. An ACE inhibitor will often be administered to prevent the body from making angiotensin II, and an angiotensin receptor blocker is available to those who do not respond as desired to the ACE inhibitor. Many patients with heart problems are given nitroglycerin for this reason.

Along with medicine, research into the field of congestive heart failure is ongoing. The speculated use of stem cells, particularly embryonic stem cells, has opened a whole field of debate for possible treatment of heart failure in the science community. Patients with congestive heart failure were given some of their own stem cells in the heart via injection, and all reacted favorably. Scientists are unsure as to whether this is because the stem cells aid the body in growing new vessels or simply act as a lighthouse for the body’s natural healing mechanisms, drawing other cells to the site of the damage. Whichever the case may be, stem cells present a fascinating opportunity to finally find a means by which to restore heart function to patients who have suffered heart failure.

Modern science is providing a whole new world of treatment options to patients with congestive heart failure, and researchers are making new discoveries all the time. It is the hope of all of those in the medical field that one day heart failure will be another disease medicine has the answer to.

What New Therapies for Treatment of Congestive Heart Failure?

Heart disease is one of the deadliest killers in the world to date. Congestive heart failure, a condition found secondary to many major cardiac diseases, possesses its own high mortality rate. Fifty percent of those diagnosed with congestive heart failure will die within the five following years. Scientists and researchers are struggling to understand the exact mechanisms of the disease, and to find a cure.

Congestive heart failure results as the cells in the heart die or become non-functioning due to an event such as a myocardial infarction (a heart attack) or ischemic heart disease. Whatever the cause, the heart is subsequently unable to pump blood adequately throughout the body, resulting in the blood pooling in the organs and fluid building up in and around the lungs as sodium is unable to be properly excreted, causing the dyspnea that is the classic symptom of congestive heart failure.

Clinical research is targeted at both the treatment of the disease and the possibility of repairing the damaged cells in the heart. Current research is underway to test new medications that would assist in vasodilation, as well as a calcium inhibitor that would not result in the higher incidence of cardiac arrhythmia seen with the medications currently on the market.

In the age of natural medicine, the power of the mind has been invoked in clinical trials to use meditation and relaxation techniques to combat the stress on the heart that can be the breaking point for patients with heart failure. Stress has been shown to negatively affect the body’s blood pressure, forcing the heart to work harder and placing an undue amount of pressure on an already weakened muscle. The theory lies in the belief that by learning to maintain a low level of mental stress the heart will be less stressed and therefore less likely to fail completely, and the patient can be given a better prognosis.

Alongside the return to natural, holistic methods of treatment is an incredible advancement in clinical technology that was not available twenty or thirty years ago. Scientists claim to have identified a set of altered genes that can make an individual more disposed to suffer from congestive heart failure and are using their current knowledge of genes and the benefits of gene therapy to attempt to reverse the effect. In addition, medications to tamp down on the genes’ activities, such as beta blockers and alpha-2 agonists are already available and being used in treatment programs.

Also being explored is the possibility of using stem cells, the body’s pluripotent progenitors, to assist in reparation of the damaged heart tissue. Clinical trials showed that patients suffering from congestive heart failure responded very favorably to an injection of their own stem cells into the heart, although the exact means by which this causes improvement is as yet unknown. It is suspected that these cells either facilitate the growth of new vessels in the heart or act as beacon, attracting the body’s own healing cells to the site of the damage and stimulating repair.

The possibility of actually growing healthy tissue from embryonic stem cells to be transplanted is also being explored, although the controversial nature of the use of embryonic stem cells due to the necessary destruction of the embryo makes this questionable in the foreseeable future. Scientists have determined that adult stem cells simply cannot provide an adequate number of new cells to meet the needs of patients who have suffered heart failure.

Heart failure is incredibly dangerous because the body cannot reproduce the dead tissue cells in the heart; however, with modern advancements it is the great hope of researchers everywhere to one day find a cure.