Understanding Congestive Heart Failure and its Management

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Congestive heart failure is a chronic state, often referred to as heart failure. Heart failure occurs when the heart muscle does not pump blood as well as it should. There are various complications with congestive heart failure. For example, narrowing arteries in the heart, known as coronary artery disease or high blood pressure, repeatedly leave the heart too weak or stiff to fill and pump successfully. Sadly, not all situations that lead to heart failure are reversible, but treatments are implemented to improve the symptoms of heart failure and provide a longer lifestyle. Day-to-day lifestyle changes such as exercising, reducing salt, managing stress, and losing weight can improve the quality of life. Additionally, a patient taking a combination …show more content…

First, is the inability of the heart to maintain adequate cardiac output to support full functions; and second, is the recruitment of implements planned to maintain the cardiac reserve. Preload represents the stiffing that exists in the walls of the heart as an outcome of diastolic filling. Afterload represents the force to contract the heart, which must produce to eject blood from the filled atriums. Contractility is the ability of the contractile fundamentals of the heart muscle to interact and shorten against a load. Overall cardiac output is the amount of blood that the heart pumps each minute.
Congestive heart failure represents the end product of the many conditions that reduce the thrusting ability of the heart. Congestive heart failure is not a detailed disease but a illness that is measured by the inability of the heart to pump blood adequate with the metabolic needs of the body. Heart failure is accompanied by overcrowding of the body tissues. For instance, heart failure may be shown as an acute condition as in pulmonary edema or as a chronic condition as in congestive heart …show more content…

The right side of the heart moves deoxygenated blood. Once heart failure occurs this causes an accumulation or damming back flow of blood into the systemic venous system. Congestive heart failure results to blood back up and drains into the inferior vena cava, and the liver become swelled. The amount of edema fluid is an indication by a gain in weight. Therefore, daily measurements of weight gained can be used to calculating fluid accumulation in congestive heart failure. The left side of the heart moves oxygenated blood. When heart failures occurs the heart shifts blood from a low-pressure pulmonary circulation into a high-pressure side of the systemic circulation. Proximate is a decrease in cardiac output that increases in the left atrial and left ventricle diastolic pressures, and congestion in the pulmonary circulation. This increase in pulmonary pressure leads to pulmonary edema. In severe pulmonary edema, capillary fluid moves into the alveoli, which impairs the respiratory passages for adequate gas

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