Despite the alleviation of symptoms and longer survival conferred by pharmacological management of chronic congestive heart failure (CHF), this progressive syndrome remains associated with high morbidity and premature death. A new treatment of CHF should ideally alleviate symptoms, improve functional capacity, decrease mortality, and slow or reverse its progression without adding risks for the ...

The documentation of preferential activation of the cardiac sympathetic outflow in patients with heart failure swept aside an entrenched notion that there was a functional sympathetic denervation of the failing heart and provided a theoretical basis for the clinical evaluation of beta-adrenergic blocker therapy in this condition. The demonstration that heightened sympathetic nervous system acti...

OBJECTIVE To study the feasibility of using electronic medical record (EMR) data from the Deliver Primary Healthcare Information (DELPHI) database to measure quality of care for patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) in primary care and to determine the percentage of patients with CHF receiving the recommended care. DESIGN Items listed on the Ontario Ministry of Health and Long-Term Car...

A risk stratification system to discriminate congestive heart failure (CHF) subjects from healthy subjects is proposed. All the previous research to detect CHF patients using Lempel-Ziv complexity measure had used binary coarsegraining (BLZC). In this work, we show that employing multi-valued coarsegraining Lempel-Ziv complexity (MLZC) improves the performance of classification. This finding is...

BACKGROUND The purpose of the present study was to assess the short-term effects of positive pressure ventilation (PPV) on plasma amino terminal-pro brain natriuretic peptide (NT-proBNP) levels in patients with congestive heart failure (CHF) and sleep apnea (SA). METHODS AND RESULTS Polysomnography was performed in 105 CHF patients. Twenty-six patients with CHF and SA were randomly assigned t...

This study describes efficacy of continuous infusion of bumetanide in severe congestive heart failure (CHF) associated with severe renal failure. Renal failure progresses as CHF advances. Renin-angiotensin inhibitor drugs consisting of angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor and angiotensin receptor blocker are main stay of therapy in CHF. These drugs aggravate renal failure, decrease urine out...

A survey of members of the Heart Failure Society of America revealed that despite their lack of approval by the United States Food and Drug Administration, nitrates are widely used in patients with chronic congestive heart failure (CHF). Most members reported using nitrates in patients with ischemic (90%) and nonischemic (81%) causes of chronic CHF, especially those with symptomatic CHF (43% re...

Atrial fibrillation (AF) and congestive heart failure (CHF) are the new epidemics of the third millennium due to ageing of the population and the success of new therapies for acute cardiac illnesses that, in the past, were fatal. The interactions between AF and CHF are only partially understood, and the effectiveness of drugs as well as that of non-pharmacological interventions remains often di...