Vasodilators in Acute Heart Failure: Who Needs Them and How Soon?

DR. TEERLINK: I assume we are limiting our discussion to acute decompensated HF or acute HF today. I think the utility of vasodilators and the neurohormonal antagonists in chronic HF has been well established, but it’s in the field of acute HF where we’re still learning about these agents. Initially, our research in this field was a bit stymied as many of the early researchers were involved in transplant centers. The early picture of an acute HF patient was actually a pretransplant patient, and this is usually a patient with low systolic blood pressure (BP) who had chronic HF that had decompensated.