Congestive heart failure occurs if your heart cannot fill up with enough blood or pump sufficient amounts of blood with enough force to the rest of your body.
Click here to learn more about what is heart failure.
Because of the decreased blood flow, your body cannot function normally. Fluid accumulates in the lungs, ankles, or legs, creating general fatigue and shortness of breath.
If the leg arteries are affected, you may experience fatigue or pain in the lower extremities, especially upon walking.
In this video you will learn more about heart failure:
The most common cause of heart failure is the damage to the muscles of your heart, as a result of previous heart attacks. However, there is an increasing evidence that sleep apnea has a link with congestive heart failure.
For example, a recent study shows that patients with severe and moderate obstructive sleep apnea had higher left ventricular mass and left ventricular mass index, and left ventricular global dysfunction.
If you have central apnea you should be careful. Most individuals with central sleep apnea have heart failure, and they also have an increased risk of death.
If you didn't know until now, sleep apnea can:
increase blood pressure
impair ventricular function
increase pulmonary artery pressure
cause diabetes, when your risk for heart failure can be eight times greater that of someone who doesn't have diabetes.
All this side effects of sleep apnea can worsen congestive heart failure.
Other heart failure causes are:
high blood pressure
abnormal heart valves
rheumatic heart disease
congenital heart disease
diabetes
heart muscle disease or inflamamtion
thyroid disease
severe lung disease
If you are interested to learn more about causes of heart failure, please
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The damage of heart failure is permanent. Once it happens, it doesn't go away, even if medication or surgery makes your symptoms disappear. The more damage your heart receives, the less able it is to sustain the lifestyle you want to live.
This is why prevention is so critical and the earlier you start, the better your chances of saving your heart.
Heart failure is a gradual and progressive disease that may take many years to reach the point of symptoms.
The signs of heart failure often appear after physical activity, and as the disease gets more severe, the symptoms last longer.
Here are the most common symptoms of heart failure:
shortness of breath, or difficulty breathing
tiredness and weakness
swelling of the ankles, feet, legs, or abdomen
weight gain from water build-up
coughing, especially at night or when lying down, including bloody spit
To learn more about symptoms of heart failure, please
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If you think you have symptoms of heart failure, pick up the phone and schedule an immediate appointment with your doctor to evaluate your symptoms. And if you have sleep apnea, you should tell him about your sleep problem, too.
Heart failure is sometimes only a side effect from a serious disorder, and treating your heart with medications and surgery will not be complete without treating that serious disorder.
Sleep related breathing disorders are highly prevalent in patients with established cardiovascular disease, and you learned that central sleep apnea occurs mainly in patients with heart failure.
Treatment options for heart failure are:
positive airway pressure, or CPAP
oxygen supplementation
optimize treatment of heart failure
With obstructive sleep apnea, you are advised to reduce weight and to abstain from alcohol and sedatives which may cause pharyngeal collapse during sleep. These general measures may reduce the severity of your heart failure and the severity of obstructive apnea.
Treating sleep apnea may be relevant in patients with heart failure and sleep disorders. However, this does not imply that all patients with hypertension, atrial fibrilation, angina, or heart failure should be treated the same way.
There is no evidence that specific drugs used to treat congestive heart failure have any direct influence on the severity of sleep apnea.
In general, once the disease takes hold of your heart, the most common interventions are drugs and surgery. But lifestyle changes are an element of intervention, too.
However, if you want to use herbal or natural remedies as part of your treatment program, you need to know that some substances have harmful effects in combination with medications to treat heart problems or when heart disease exists.
