What Is Heart Failure?
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For the Charlottesville area:
434.243.1000For Northern Virginia:
703.369.5959One in 5 people will get heart failure. It's a life-threatening condition where the heart can't pump enough blood around your body.
What Is Heart Failure?
There are two types of heart failure:
- Systolic means the heart muscle is weak. This usually happens when the left lower chamber (ventricle) is enlarged and can't contract the way it should. That means it can't pump with enough force to push blood through your body.
- Diastolic means the heart muscle is stiff and can't contract or relax properly. That means it can't fill up with enough blood. It lowers how much blood is pumped through your body.
If your heart issues don't get better with medications, devices, or other surgeries, you may be a candidate for a heart transplant. In a heart transplant, the diseased heart is replaced with a healthy, working heart from a someone else (a donor).
Our heart failure team works with you and your family to treat and watch your condition. From lifestyle changes like diet and exercise to medications, heart implants, and transplants, we personalize your care plan for your needs.
Heart Failure: What It Is & How We Treat It
Very few hospitals offer all levels of care for heart failure at one site. Learn about this and other distinguishing factors of heart failure treatment at UVA.
The majority of heart failure patients experience fatigue and shortness of breath. They may also develop other signs or symptoms such as bloating in the abdomen or swelling in the feet. They may also have troubles such as filling up quickly when they start to eat. That's called early satiety.
All of those would speak to congestion of the abdominal organs. What we commonly see are patients who think they're fine. They're just coughing, they're a little bit more short of breath. They think that they have a pneumonia or something. They see a physician. They put them on antibiotics, and it just doesn't clear.
And then eventually, someone ends up doing some sort of heart study like an Echo or something, and that's when they determine that all along, the whole cause of this has been not the lungs, but it's the heart. So the first things we like to cover in treatment options would be to instruct the patients as far as salt and fluid intake. Because that can have a big impact.
The next treatment option usually is trying to control the amount of fluid in the system and such using a diuretic. So a fluid pill to get rid of extra fluid. And then putting them on therapies to make it easier for the heart to eject the blood. So these are all the standard medical regimens that we use. The next step up is, if someone's having continued symptoms despite all of those therapies, then we start talking about heart pumps.
So assist pumps. And these are usually durable pumps that people-- you would put in with surgery, and they would be up walking around and living long term with. I think people should come to UVA because we have the unique ability to really provide all aspects of care. Once you step in, we're able to cover it all.
You don't have to go next door to some other clinic. You don't have to go down the street to a different hospital or see other physicians. We can really offer everything right here. So it's the cardiologist, the cardiovascular surgeons. It's the lung doctors who are involved with the care compliment us in clinic. We have the GI doctors, the blood doctors.
Everyone is right here at all phases. We offer transplantation of all organs. So very few hospitals in the region, in the area, or in the United States are able to offer all levels of care at all sites.
Our heart failure program won 2 national awards from the American Heart Association for the quality of our care. We’ve reduced the time to recover and readmission rates for our heart failure patients by taking important steps that include:
- Device therapy (pacemakers, ICDs, LVAD and ECMO)
- Follow-up appointments within several days of hospital discharge
- Flu and pneumonia vaccinations
- Patient education materials about heart failure management and readmission rates
At UVA Health, we’ve received the highest possible rating for 14 common conditions and procedures by U.S. News & World Report, including our heart failure care.
See more about our award-winning care.