Warning Signs of Congestive Heart Failure

Signs, Symptoms, Warning Signs of Congestive Heart Failure

Congestive heart failure is possibly the most under-diagnosed and the most under-treated of some of the major killers. However, there has been some progression in the research involved in understanding congestive heart failure, and there are ways to detect as well as treat the condition before any serious damage is caused.

Until very recently, people as well as doctors often overlooked or sometimes downplayed the early signs and symptoms of congestive heart failure because the symptoms were usually common in nature, which could just be associated with age related factors. But these symptoms proved to be the warning signs of congestive heart failure later on after thorough diagnosis. If you can learn about the warning signs, you can as well make it a point to convince your doctor about the facts of the symptoms.

Understand the Condition

Congestive heart failure is usually caused when the heart muscles are damaged due to heart attack or prolonged hypertension or some other chronic vulvular disease that impairs the capability of the heart to pump blood properly throughout the body. This causes the cells of the body to get very little oxygen, thus causing “fatigue”.

Fluids back up into the lungs, which causes shortness of breath, cough and congestion. This is the reason why the condition is known as congestive heart failure.

Fluids also back up in the veins, which leads to swollen ankles.

The condition is likely to aggravate over time, until the heart actually fails to supply enough blood to the body for sustaining life.

Systolic heart failure, which is the most common form, occurs when our heart fails to contract forcefully to eject the blood in the primary pumping chamber.

But in about 40% of the case of congestive heart failure, this inadequate circulation of blood stems from the diastolic heart failure, which in turn prevents the chambers from filling up with enough blood before contracting due to stiffening of the heart muscles.

Knowing the warning signs

Echocardiograph heart ultrasound can easily reveal the preliminary stages of congestive heart failure. But as these are pretty expensive procedures, experts usually recommend these tests to people having prolonged heart illness or the ones who are at a risk of developing the disease, especially:

 People who have has heart attack in the past.
 People having a heart murmur.
 People having elevated levels of blood pressure for a considerable period of time.
 People taking drugs for cancer that can be harmful for the heart muscles.

In some cases, people showing some of these signs and symptoms, usually explained by other relevant causes can also be alarming, such as:

 Exertion or shortness of breath
 Fatigue
 Wheezing
 Frequent cough
 Unexplained and rapid weight gain
 Swollen ankles
 Bulging veins of the neck

If any of these signs and symptoms is noticed, the doctor would immediately recommend the necessary diagnosis for better evaluation. Once evaluated, the disease can be treated with medications. Though it is difficult to promise 100% relief, but most of the times, the condition can be controlled. In some rare cases however, surgery becomes essential for treating the condition completely.