Early diagnosis and treatment can be helpful to safeguard the people with heart failure against its complication and provide them longer and active lives.
Heart failure treatment
Treatment for heart failure depends on its type and stage, but main goals are:
- Provide treatment for the condition, which is the underlying cause of the heart failure, such as coronary heart disease, hyperlipidemia, hypertension, or diabetes.
- Relieve the symptoms
- Prevent the heart failure progression.
- Provides a longer and quality active life
Heart failure treatment can include therapeutic lifestyle changes, medications, and if needed other medical procedures and surgery.
Lifestyle Measures for heart failure
- Stick to Healthy Eating Plan by lowering salt, low sugar, saturated fat, trans-fat, and cholesterol. Salt can support a fluid buildup in the body, causing the heart failure worse. Sugar may increase or cause diabetes and play a role in increasing blood cholesterol. Fat, saturated fat, Trans-fat, and cholesterol can increase the blood cholesterol levels, LDL - bad cholesterol and lowering the HDL - good cholesterol. Hyperlipidemia can cause heart disease and heart failure.
- Increase potassium intake, because many of the heart failure medications can deplete the potassium level in the body. Lack of potassium can cause rapid heartbeat; it is a dangerous condition may even lead to sudden death. Potassium rich sources are bananas, beets, strawberries, raisins, and greens. Consult health care team for any additional potassium supplements.
- Increase intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans, seeds, nuts and some varieties of fishes.
- If overweight, plan to lose some weight in steps safely.
- Increase physical activity can lower many risk factors of heart failure, discuss with the healthcare team for some useful tips.
- Check weight everyday, if sudden weight gain or loss immediately consults the doctor.
- An alcohol drinker should plan to stop alcohol to avoid a danger. For severe heart failure, stop alcohol additionally even limits the fluid intake.
- A smoker should quit smoking, and even stop exposing to second-hand smoke.
- Finally yet importantly, get enough sleep and rest.
For detail information on “Therapeutic Lifestyle Changes,” you can visit cholesterol home-remedies (or therapeutic lifestyle changes).
Heart failure Medications
Most commonly used medication for treating heart failure.
- Diuretics or water fluid pills help to reduce the fluid buildup in the body, thus for the treatment of swelling due to a fluid buildup.
- ACE inhibitors help to lower blood pressure and reduce the heart’s load, thus reduce the risk of a heart attack.
- Aldosterone antagonists stimulate the body to remove salt and water through urine, thus lowers the blood volume that the heart needs to pump.
- Angiotensin receptor blockers lower the blood pressure by dilating the blood vessels, so the heart is relieved from hard work.
- Beta-blockers - reduce heart rate and blood pressure by dilating blood vessels. Thus decrease the workload on the heart, can be useful to treat irregular heartbeat or arrhythmias.
- Digoxin helps the heart to beat stronger and pump enough blood.
- For very severe heart failure, give medicines intravenously (IV) that is injecting into veins in the arms.
- Need to take oxygen if trouble breathing even after medications, give extra oxygen in the hospital or home. Learn how to get oxygen from the healthcare team.
Medical procedures and surgery for heart failure
If lifestyle changes and medications not reduce the severity of the heart failure, then medical procedures and surgery may need.
Coronary Artery Bypass Grafting - Take arteries or veins from other parts of the body and placed around blocked coronary to bypass it in a surgical procedure. This makes a new route for proper blood flow to the heart muscle.
Cardiac resynchronization therapy - In 30% of heart failure cases, instead of beating simultaneously, the two ventricles beat slightly out of phase and disrupts the hearts pumping. To correct this problem, a type of pacemaker is implanting near the heart. This device helps to resynchronize both sides of the heart and decrease the symptoms.
Cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) - ICD helps to control ventricular arrhythmia or irregular heartbeat. Without treatment, ventricular arrhythmia can cause sudden cardiac arrest. Cardioverter defibrillator is implanting to solve this problem. It senses for any heart beat irregularity, if so it will send out a mild shock to the heart and bring back to the normal rhythm.
Left ventricular assist device - It is a mechanical heart pump helps to pump blood from the heart to the rest of the body. Mostly, people use this pump until they go for heart transplant.
Heart transplant - Heart transplant is recommended when all other treatments fail to produce results or in case of severe heart failure. Some people can receive healthy hearts from a deceased donor.