Heart failure: can we define, assess, and treat diastolic heart failure?

Acute heart failure risk stratification: can we define low risk?

The emergency department evaluation and management of patients who have potential acute heart failure syndromes (AHFS) has remained a significant challenge for decades. The emergency physician's diagnostic tools for heart failure have remained limited, and the complexity of the syndrome itself has led to risk-averse practice styles with extremely high admission rates. Recently, new diagnostic m...

Diastolic Heart Failure

Diastolic heart failure.

to the editor: Zile et al. (May 6 issue) 1 conclude that heart failure develops in patients with a normal ejection fraction because of abnormal active and passive diastolic function. However, the applicability of this conclusion to all such patients is uncertain for several reasons. First, accurate assessment of left ventricular volume, on which the conclusions critically depend, requires a thr...

Defining diastolic heart failure.

The diagnosis of diastolic heart failure suggested by Vasan and Levy1 and Grossman,2 as definite, probable, or possible, presently hinges on the demonstration of diastolic left ventricular (LV) dysfunction at cardiac catheterization or echocardiography. It is likely that a far simpler measure, which is based on an analysis of the arterial pulse measured noninvasively, can be used. The studies o...

Diastolic heart failure.