All you ever need know about treatment of Heart failure diuretics ACE inhibitors oxygen HD
The treatment of heart failure is straight forward too you look for a cause if you can and put it right so if some one is desperately anaemic you treat that if some one is extremely thyrotoxic you treat that but as you have guessed usually off course they are neither and you have to come back and treat patients who does not have a cause and the sheet anchor of treatment is the use of DIURETIC drugs that is drugs that make you pass more sodium and therefore more water so that patients get rid of their edema you get rid of the body fluid if is in the body cavities disappears too and the venous pressure falls and the heart returns to some normality / direutic therapy these days is extremely effective and given by oral agents and drugs like chlorothiazide and usually patients will respond. It may be necessary to restrict the amount of salt sodium they take in their diet / Now it is possible to use drugs which zip up the failing heart and make it beat more effectively we call those positive inotrpopic drugs only one you need know about is Digitalis and the reason you ought top know about that is because it is now very much less popular in the treatment of HF than it use to be and is really retained for patients who have heart failure complicated by a disorder of the heart rhythm called auricular fibrillation where the auricles instead of beating like that are just shimmering like that and that gives rise to ineffectual pumping of blood to the ventricles which do not know what to do and respond rather quickly and ineffectively and if you can break that down by blocking the impulses between the auricles and the ventricles with digitalis so that the ventricles have a chance to respond more slowly then that because a very effective drug but not in most patients with heart failure Patients with heart failure are given continuous oxygen via a nasal probe. And sometimes patients are put on what is called triple therapy this is where it gets a little difficult for you we put them on group of drugs called ACE inhibitors ACE stands for Angiotension converting enzyme and angitension converting enzyme if you remember turns angiotension 1 which is ineffective to Angiotension 2 which would put your BP up and that switches on aldesterone if you can inhibit Angiotensin 1 you vasodilate the circulation because angiotensin causes constriction of blood vessels in order to put the BP up if you can inhibit it you produce vasodilation and all of these things 3 things ACE inhibitors nitrates And calcium blocking agents are all vasodilators and if you give vasodilators to some one in heart failure you take the strain of the failing heart that is what it amounts to so you would see patients given these things in Heart failure over and above the standard therapy which is direutics and perhaps digitalis and oxygen the only other thing you can do because Heart failure is recurrent if you had a young patient with Heart failure which was resistant to therapy you may even con