Heart failure awareness week: February 14-21.

The statistics pertaining to heart failure are awesome. It now affects 4.6 million Americans, and 400,000 new cases are diagnosed each year. After a diagnosis is made, less than 50% of patients survive more than five years, and less than 25% survive more than 10 years. Class IV heart failure carries about a 50% mortality in one year. Deaths from heart failure rose 120% from 1979 to 1996, and hospital discharges rose from 377,000 to 870,000. Heart failure is the number one hospital DRG in the Medicare population. This epidemic of heart failure has spawned a new organization, the Heart Failure Society of America. They have designated February 14–21 as Heart Failure Awareness Week. Part of the reason for this is to highlight relative inequities of NIH funding for heart failure research. For example, in 1997 the NIH allocated $28 million for breast cancer research and $132 million for lung cancer research. Yet the prevalence of heart failure is double that of the other two diseases combined. There are three main goals of this heart failure initiative: