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Mayo Clinic is a world leader in developing innovative ways to diagnose and treat heart failure. At Mayo, teams of experts work together to find the most effective treatment for each patient.
Congestive heart failure affects nearly five million Americans, with 550,000 new cases diagnosed each year. Because heart failure is more common as people age, it's expected that another 15 million to 20 million people could develop it in the next five years.
A tremendous amount of progress has been made in treating heart failure, prolonging life and improving the quality of life. Although in many cases there's no way to reverse damage to heart function, treatments can significantly improve symptoms, and along with lifestyle changes, a weakened heart can be helped to work as efficiently as possible.
Mayo has many tools to help make an accurate diagnosis. In addition, research currently underway at Mayo Clinic is focusing on ways to detect and diagnosis heart failure in its very early stages. Read more about congestive heart failure diagnosis.
The goals of treatment include:
In some cases, heart failure can be treated by correcting the underlying cause. For example, controlling a fast heart rhythm may reverse structural heart abnormalities. While in many cases structural abnormalities cannont be corrected, treatment can usually markedly decrease symptoms and increase life expectancy and quality of life. Treatment may include lifestyle changes, medications, transcatheter interventions, medical devices and surgery. Read more about congestive heart failure treatment options.
The Heart Failure Clinic in Rochester is one of the largest and most experienced in the nation, having treated nearly 8,000 patients since opening in 1991. The clinic's cardiologists and nurses have special training in heart failure, and are experts in the diagnosis and treatment of both common and rare forms of the disease. The Heart Failure Clinic in Arizona offers a patient-centered approach to the treatment of this devastating disease. The clinic features a team approach with emphasis on patient education, convenient clinic access and state of the art utilization of advanced treatment modalities for effective management.
The words "heart failure" sound scary, as if the heart is about to fail at any second. What it really means is that the heart is not pumping as well as it should to deliver oxygen-rich blood to the body's cells. The term congestive heart failure (CHF) describes the condition in which there is a buildup of fluid (called congestion) in the lungs and other body tissues.
How serious the condition is depends on how much pumping capacity the heart has lost. Most people lose some pumping capacity as they age. But the loss is significantly more in heart failure which often results from a heart attack or other diseases that damage the heart such as coronary artery disease or high blood pressure, which typically develops slowly over many years.
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