Objective(s): Exercise training is a well-known accelerator for the treatment of chronic heart failure (CHF). The current study aimed to investigate the restorative effects of aerobic interval training (AIT) intervention on myocardial energy metabolism in CHF rats. Materials and Methods: Post-myocardial infarction (MI) heart failure animal model was established. The Sprague-Dawley rats were ran...

BACKGROUND Although angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor therapy has been shown to improve clinical outcomes of patients with systolic dysfunction, it has been underused or prescribed in inadequate dosages by physicians in the treatment of congestive heart failure. Our goal was to evaluate whether integration of a clinical guideline within a continuous quality improvement program would...

In the early 1990s, the idea first arose that plasma concentrations of B type natriuretic peptide (BNP) might help target scarce cardiac investigations towards the most deserving. This mainly referred to the possibility that BNP could detect which patients had heart failure and which did not. This was based on the fact that echocardiography slots were limited, and that heart failure was hard to...

A grade 4/6 systolic murmur, systolic anterior motion of the mitral valve (SAM), and severe mitral regurgitation (MR) documented by two-dimensional Doppler echocardiography developed suddenly on the structurally normal heart of a patient with idiopathic portal hypertension. The patient did not have signs of congestive heart failure and the aforementioned phenomenon disappeared completely when t...

BACKGROUND Hypertension has been established as one of the commonest causes of heart failure especially in sub-Saharan Africa. We have previously observed a high prevalence of left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction in hypertensive heart failure patients in Nigeria despite a low prevalence of ischemic heart disease. The present study was, therefore, undertaken to assess the prevalence of asy...

Heart failure is frequently a result of impaired systolic ventricular performance. We describe a patient with heart failure and a systemic arteriovenous fistula who had left ventricular enlargement and a normal left ventricular ejection fraction, demonstrated by gated cardiac blood pool scanning. The heart failure was relieved by surgical repair of the fistula, but the left ventricular ejection...

Nearly half of patients with symptoms of heart failure are found to have a normal left ventricular (LV) ejection fraction. This has variously been labelled as diastolic heart failure, heart failure with preserved LV function or heart failure with a normal ejection fraction (HFNEF). As recent studies have shown that systolic function is not entirely normal in these patients, HFNEF is the preferr...

Disturbances in cardiovascular neural regulation, influencing both disease course and survival, progress as heart failure worsens. Heart failure due to left ventricular systolic dysfunction has long been considered a state of generalized sympathetic activation, itself a reflex response to alterations in cardiac and peripheral hemodynamics that is initially appropriate, but ultimately pathologic...