Here’s What You Need to Know About Congestive Heart Failure: An Introduction

It's no secret that body function begins and ends with your heart. This organ, which is roughly the size of your fist, pumps blood throughout the body, provides oxygen and nutrients to the tissues and eliminates carbon dioxide and other waste.1 Maintaining good heart health is important, especially as you age, because the heart can be damaged throughout time, causing impaired heart function and development of diseases such as congestive heart failure.

What Is Congestive Heart Failure?

Congestive heart failure, also called heart failure, occurs when fluid builds up around the heart and causes the muscles surrounding it to pump inefficiently. Fluid builds up when ventricles responsible for pumping blood to the organ and tissues fail to pump back blood in adequate amounts to your body.2

Congestive heart failure can affect people of all ages. While this disease is more common among middle-aged adults and the elderly, children and young adults may be diagnosed with it too.3

Congestive Heart Failure by the Numbers

Around 5.7 million adults in the U.S. have been diagnosed with heart failure,4 and roughly 550,000 new cases occur each year. Nearly 1.4 million people with congestive heart failure are under 60 years old, and in hospital patients 65 years old and above, congestive heart failure is the most common diagnosis. The incidence of congestive heart failure is equally frequent between men and women, although from a racial standpoint, African-Americans are 1.5 times more likely to develop this disease compared to Caucasians.

Congestive heart failure is a burden to your health and wallet, since an estimated $30.7 billion each year is spent on expenditures related to the disease, such as health care services, medicines and missed days of work. Furthermore, 11 million physician visits yearly are attributed to congestive heart failure, and this disease is the first-listed diagnosis in 875,000 hospitalizations, said to be more than all forms of cancer combined.

About half of people who develop congestive heart failure may die within five years of diagnosis.  Sudden death is common among people with congestive heart failure, occurring at a rate six to nine times higher than that of the general population. Congestive heart failure contributes to approximately 287,000 deaths a year. (MORE)

Source: Mercola.com