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Heart health maintenance can be key to avoiding CHFCongestive Heart Failure (CHF) brings to mind an elderly person with an oxygen tank for most people. Daniel Holmberg, MD, a family medicine physician at New Ulm Medical Center, wants his younger patients to stop thinking of it as something that they don’t have to worry about until their older because it is the damage that can be done to a person’s heart when they are young that can lead to CHF later on. In a nutshell, CHF is when a person’s heart has lost the ability to pump blood effectively. According to the American Heart Association (AHA), CHF is the single most frequent cause of hospitalization for people age 65 and older. There are approximately 250,000 hospitalizations each year due to heart failure. “CHF is really the end process after something else has injured the heart,” Holmberg said. That injury can include years of high blood pressure, smoking, drinking too much alcohol, obesity or a diabetic condition that is not regulated. According to the AHA, 70 percent of men and 79 percent of women who have heart failure have hypertension prior to developing CHF. “There are also conditions like atrial fibrillation that can lead to CHF,” Holmberg said. In general, common sense steps such as keeping blood pressure under control, quitting smoking, maintaining a low-salt and low-fat diet and, if you are a diabetic, keeping your blood sugar under control can go a long way towards avoiding CHF in later years. “Exercise and diet are particularly important for anyone who might be at risk,” Holmberg said. “Keeping your heart strong is important.” Statistics surrounding CHF are not great: about half the people diagnosed with CHF will die within five years, according to the American Heart Association. In people diagnosed with heart failure, sudden cardiac death occurs at 6 to 9 times the rate of the general population. The good news is that the treatment of the disease has improved over the last 20 years, Holmberg said. “There is a whole new class of medicines, ARBs (Angiotension Receptor Blockers), that wasn’t around 20 years ago.” There are also tests that can more accurately pinpoint the damage to the heart now that didn’t exist years ago. Treatment for CHF is targeted toward what kind of CHF the patient has, which is determined by which part of the heart is affected. There are certain types of blood pressure medications such as beta blockers, Ace inhibitors and ARBs, which can help to prolong a CHF patient’s life. “Standard medical practice used to be to not put anybody with heart problems on beta blockers because it slows down the heart beat, but we have now found that it actually helps if we start it at a very low dose and build up the dosage over time,” Holmberg said. Warning signs of CHF include: trouble breathing that is worse during exercise or when lying down and swelling in the ankles, legs or abdomen. You should seek care immediately if you are too dizzy to stand up, or have signs of a heart attack such as chest pain that spreads to your arms, jaw or back, nausea, sweating, or if you are having more trouble than usual breathing or cannot sleep or rest because of breathing problems. |
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New Ulm Medical Center
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