Congestive Heart Failure - Symptoms, Treatment
Heart disease is one of the deadliest killers in the world to date. But all Congestive heart failure, a condition found secondary to many major cardiac diseases, possesses its own high mortality rate. Fifty percent of those diagnosed with congestive heart failure will die within the five following years. Scientists and researchers are struggling to understand the exact mechanisms of the disease, and to find a cure.
Congestive heart failure results as the cells in the heart die or become non-functioning due to an event such as a myocardial infarction (a heart attack) or ischemic heart disease. Whatever the cause, the heart is subsequently unable to pump blood adequately throughout the body, resulting in the blood pooling in the organs and fluid building up in and around the lungs as sodium is unable to be properly excreted, causing the dyspnea that is the classic symptom of congestive heart failure.
Clinical research is targeted at both the treatment of the disease and the possibility of repairing the damaged cells in the heart. There are lots of new medications that would assist in vasodilation that are currently being researched, there are medications currently on the market that present a higher incidence of cardiac arrhythmia that couldn’t be stopped by the current research.
Meditation and relaxation techniques have been used in this new age of natural medicine, these are undergoing clinical trials to help patients relax and combat stress on their heart. The body’s blood pressure can be negatively effected by stress, causing an already weakened muscle to be forced to work harder which in turn places an undue amount of pressure on this precious organ. The heart is less likely to fail completely and therefore giving the patient a better prognosis if the heart is under less stress, this is the theory that lies in the belief that by learning to maintain a lower level of mental stress your hearts will not be under so much pressure.
There have been incredible advancements in clinical technology that’s was not available 20 or 30 years ago, this is due to new and advanced holistic methods of treatment. Attempts are being made to reverse the effects of congestive heart disease, scientists are now claiming to have identified a set of altered genes that can make an individual more disposed to suffer from this type of heart disease. Drugs such as beta blockers and Alpha 2 agonists are already available and being used in treatment programs, they are being used to tamp down the genes activities.
There are many types of research and one of these is stem cell research, this uses the bodies pluripotent progenitors which assist in the repair of the damage to heart tissue. Clinical trials showed that patients suffering from congestive heart failure responded very favorably to an injection of their own stem cells into the heart, although the exact means by which this causes improvement is as yet unknown. Stem cells can help facilitate the growth of new vessels in the heart, it is also believed they stimulate and repair the heart by extracting the bodies own healing cells.
Current research that is being explored is transplanting embryonic stem cells into a patient’s body it is believed that they can grow healthy tissues, this is in some circles questionable as it involves the destruction of the embryo. Scientists have determined that adult stem cells simply cannot provide an adequate number of new cells to meet the needs of patients who have suffered heart failure.
A person’s body cannot reproduce dead cells in the heart and this makes heart failure incredibly dangerous; it is hoped that researchers will one day find a cure with all the modern medical advancements which are being discovered every day.