• Question: How common is heart failure? And what causes it?

    Asked by johnedwards to Mike on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Mike Dodd

      Mike Dodd answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      According to the British Heart Foundation (BHF), there are over 68,000 new cases of heart failure every year in the UK.

      The causes of heart failure can be very complicated. The most common cause is having a heart attack. This happens when a blood clot gets trapped in the arteries of your heart. The arteries of the heart normally allow blood to travel around the heart and supply it with oxygen and the fuel to keep pumping. When they are blocked, blood stops flowing and an area of the heart doesn’t get oxygen and the fuel it needs. The clot either clears after a short time, or is dissolved using drugs at hospital. The area that doesn’t get oxygen starts to die or becomes injured. Eventually a scar will form called an infarct. This is a dead area in the heart and is unable to help pump blood. The rest of the heart has to try and make up for a large dead area and so increases it’s size, in a term called hypertrophy.

      The heart also changes the way it produces energy to beat. Normally the heart gets 70% of it’s energy from fat, but after a heart attack this changes. It is believed that this change in fuel can not keep going for long and the heart starts to lose “power”, like a dying battery in a mobile phone. Like your dying phone, your heart starts to work slower and begins to “fail” where it can no longer pump blood properly around the body. Heart failure is the point where the heart can only pump less than 40-30% blood from your heart. There is build up of fluid in other body parts, where blood can’t move properly around your body. If untreated heart failure will kill someone. With treatment like ACE inhibitors, you can last many years with heart failure. But there is no cure at the moment, the only real cure is a heart transplant. My work looks at how you can prevent the heart from going into heart failure by treating it early after a heart attack. One treatment is stem cell treatment, if you want more information on this, I’ll be happy to chat in comments.

      Other causes of heart failure include diabetes, high blood pressure and drugs.

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