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When EMTs arrive on the scene of an emergency, they have to remember their ABCs. These are Airway, Breathing, and Circulation. The absolute top priority for any patient is to ensure they have an open airway to breathe, that air is entering the lungs, and that the heart is pumping blood to the brain and other organs. This is also the most important thing our body does in daily life as well. We can go weeks without food, days without water, hours without ice cream, and minutes without oxygen.

In order to get oxygen from the lungs to our brain and organs, we rely on one of the most remarkable organs in our body: the heart. The heart pumps automatically, nonstop, 24/7, from womb to grave. It consists of four chambers, two on top, and two on the bottom. Each heartbeat pulls blood into the top two chambers and pumps it out of the bottom two. The bottom two are more muscular and do the heavy lifting. Unfortunately, the heart can deteriorate and lead to heart failure. 

Heart failure is a condition where the heart can’t pump well enough to deliver oxygen to the organs effectively. The heart is still pumping, but organs are not receiving enough oxygen to function. This is not good. Heart failure affects over six million Americans and ten times as many people worldwide. Risk factors for heart failure include:

  • Heart disease, including Coronary Artery Disease
  • High Blood pressure
  • Tobacco
  • Excessive alcohol
  • Poor diet
  • Lack of exercise
  • Obesity
  • Diabetes

Heart failure has several signs and symptoms. Some of the most consistent are edema and shortness of breath. Edema is fluid trapped in the body’s tissues and most often pools in the lower extremities and the abdomen. Shortness of breath is due to the heart failing to deliver enough oxygen. This is particularly prevalent when trying to do activities or when lying down. Shortness of breath can keep patients from exercising or sleeping, which only exacerbates problems. Patients who have limited exercise in their routine may not be aware of progressive difficulty, masking this important symptom.

Other symptoms can be broad and nonspecific. They include:

  • Sudden weight gain
  • Persistent coughing or wheezing
  • Lightheadedness and fainting
  • Depression
  • Nausea and loss of appetite
  • Irregular heartbeat, high pulse, and palpitations
  • Fatigue

If you have heart failure and find yourself experiencing several of these conditions simultaneously, especially with edema and shortness of breath, we urge you to contact your physician immediately. Additionally, you may want to keep track of your level of fatigue because this symptom increases as the heart failure progresses. The excellent news is that new and exciting monitoring devices are currently being developed to help patients manage their heart failure and determine if their condition is deteriorating.

Check out clinical research options available to you with ENCORE Research Group on our enrolling studies page. 

By Benton Lowey-Ball, BS Behavioral Neuroscience



Sources:

Albert, N., Trochelman, K., Li, J., & Lin, S. (2010). Signs and symptoms of heart failure: are you asking the right questions?. American Journal of Critical Care, 19(5), 443-452. https://doi.org/ajcc2009314

Groenewegen, A., Rutten, F. H., Mosterd, A., & Hoes, A. W. (2020). Epidemiology of heart failure. European journal of heart failure, 22(8), 1342-1356. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejhf.1858

U.S. Department of Health & Human Services/Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (October 14, 2022). Heart failure  https://www.cdc.gov/heartdisease/heart_failure.htm


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Heart failure is quite frankly, a terrifying sounding condition. It is severe, but not as immediately drastic as it sounds. Put simply, heart failure is when the heart fails to pump as much blood as the body will need long-term. The heart works like a balloon, filling with blood and contracting to pump it out. Ejection fraction is a term used to describe the amount of blood pumped out compared with the total the heart can hold. In a normal heart, 50-70% of blood is ejected with each heartbeat. When this amount falls below 40%, a person has a reduced Ejection Fraction (the rEF of HFrEF). This is a serious condition.

The heart pumps blood to every cell in the body. This is how cells receive oxygen and nutrients, and how they get rid of waste products. Without enough blood, cells suffocate. Oxygen isn’t reaching cells and the brain interprets this as being short of breath. Common symptoms of HFrEF include:

  • Fatigue
  • Difficulty breathing, especially when lying down or sleeping
  • Inability to exercise
  • Ankle swelling

Inside the body, doctors can also look for diagnostic markers. These may include structural changes to the heart and increased natriuretic peptides. Natriuretic peptides are hormones that regulate the amount of salt and water in the blood. They act as vasodilators, opening blood vessels which can be helpful in compensating for heart failure. The body attempts to compensate for the loss of oxygen and nutrients in the blood in many ways, but long term the body has trouble sustaining with heart failure.

Who is at risk of developing HFrEF? Unfortunately, it is more prevalent in the United States than almost anywhere else, affecting 6.5 million Americans each year. Risk factors include age, being male, obesity, and smoking. Additionally, other medical conditions increase your risk of developing Heart Failure with reduced Ejection Fraction. Previous heart attacks, coronary heart disease, diabetes, and hypertension are some associated conditions. All told, HFrEF leads to around a million hospitalizations every year, and being hospitalized for HFrEF comes with a low 5-year survival rate.

What can be done? There are several methods of dealing with a reduced ejection fraction. Some methods treat symptoms, such as diuretics, and others can help reduce mortality, such as beta-blockers. There are several other medications and even some implantable devices that can help with HFrEF. These can help improve your ejection fraction or health outcomes but are not yet a silver bullet. New medications with increased outcomes and fewer side effects are entering clinical trials and may help with the underlying condition. To learn more about current heart failure research options, call our office today.

Written by Benton Lowey-Ball, BS Behavioral Neuroscience



Bloom, M. W., Greenberg, B., Jaarsma, T., Januzzi, J. L., Lam, C. S., Maggioni, A. P., … & Butler, J. (2017). Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction. Nature reviews Disease primers, 3(1), 1-19. https://www.nature.com/articles/nrdp201758

Martinez-Rumayor, A., Richards, A. M., Burnett, J. C., & Januzzi Jr, J. L. (2008). Biology of the natriuretic peptides. The American journal of cardiology, 101(3), S3-S8. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amjcard.2007.11.012

Murphy, S. P., Ibrahim, N. E., & Januzzi, J. L. (2020). Heart failure with reduced ejection fraction: a review. Jama, 324(5), 488-504. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.10262


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Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Though there are several types of heart disease, one of the main ways the heart actually dies is through congestive heart failure, when the heart fails to pump effectively. Ineffective pumping causes blood and other fluids to build up throughout the body. Eventually, the fluid buildup may keep the heart from functioning at all, a condition called acute decompensated heart failure. This is an emergency condition, and without rapid medical treatment quickly leads to death. Fortunately, with early intervention, several patients can recover – at least temporarily. Clearly, one of the keys to saving people is early intervention.

The vocal cords and lungs may be affected by congestive heart failure. As these fill with fluid, there are changes in how the voice sounds. These changes are difficult for people to hear, but technology might be able to help out. One type of technology looking to tackle the topic is a deep neural network called HearO.

Deep neural networks are a subset of artificial intelligence. These systems learn how to make predictions from examples. The HearO system, made by the company Cardio Medical, analyzed the voices of people with congestive heart failure. The system learned by comparing people’s voices while they were “wet” (fluid-filled while in the hospital) and “dry” (after hospital treatment and discharge). Using this, the system learned to detect voice differences in the severity of the condition.

The HearO system has now been packaged as a smartphone app. Patients talk into the app every day and it compares their voice to itself. It scans for changes that indicate a fluid build-up (and danger!). The hope is that HearO will help detect changes in the voice before acute decompensated heart failure occurs. Clinical trials are currently underway to test the HearO’s effectiveness and some of our ENCORE Research Group sites are enrolling for this. 

Written by: Benton Lowey-Ball, B.S. Behavioral Neuroscience



Sources:

Amir, O., Abraham, W. T., Azzam, Z. S., Berger, G., Anker, S. D., Pinney, S. P., … & Edelman, E. R. (2022). Remote speech analysis in the evaluation of hospitalized patients with acute decompensated heart failure. Heart Failure, 10(1), 41-49.

Brooks, M. (2015, December 15). Smartphone app could give voice to congestion in heart failure. Medscape. https://www.cordio-med.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/smartphone-app-could-give-voice-to-congestionin-heart-failure.pdf

Tomov, N. S., & Tomov, S. (2018). On deep neural networks for detecting heart disease. arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.07168.


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The heart is vital (literally), so it’s important to keep it in tip-top shape! The rest of the body depends on the heart to deliver blood and oxygen to all its cells and organs. If the heart becomes damaged, it can lead to what is known as heart failure. Keeping your heart healthy not only involves proper diet and exercise, but also involves making sure conditions that can cause heart damage are properly managed.

 

Some conditions that can damage the heart are:

  • cardiomyopathy
  • coronary artery disease
  • diabetes
  • heart attacks
  • high blood pressure

 

During heart failure the heart is unable to pump blood effectively enough to meet the body’s demands. Because the heart cannot fulfill its primary duty, it will try to compensate by enlarging itself, increasing muscle mass or pumping faster. The body can also react by narrowing blood vessels and diverting blood away from less important tissues and organs. As heart failure worsens the compensations and symptoms begin to show.

 

Common symptoms of heart failure include: shortness of breath, fatigue, coughing, racing heart, excessive tiredness, loss of appetite, and chest pain. Risk factors for developing heart failure include diabetes, poorly controlled high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or family history of heart failure. If you think you might have symptoms of heart failure, it’s important to speak with your doctor as soon as possible.

 

There are about 5.7 million adults in the United States who have heart failure and it’s the leading cause of death in diabetics. In most cases, heart failure cannot be reversed once diagnosed. However, researchers are continuing to study ways to reverse heart failure as well as new and better ways to treat it. Currently, many of our ENCORE research sites have new heart failure research studies enrolling. If you or someone you know has heart failure, and are interested in participating, call our office to find out more!

 


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Three New Breakthroughs in Heart Disease

 

Heart Disease is a general term for heart conditions that negatively impact the heart’s ability to perform its vital functions. On average 1 in 4 American deaths each year are due to heart disease.  Fortunately, each year new discoveries are made that allow us to treat heart disease more successfully.  Here are three of the latest discoveries.

 

  1. Dialysis for Heart Failure?

One of the symptoms of heart failure is fluid retention, which can lead to kidney

problems. Diuretics are currently the standard treatment for fluid retention, however there is a new treatment where a catheter in inserted through the neck so that it surrounds a major lymphatic vessel. The excess fluid is removed from the lymphatic system and then pumped back into the circulatory system where it is removed by the kidneys. This new treatment avoids some of the negative side effects of oral diuretics such as low blood pressure and decreased kidney function.

2. Beta Blockers: Old dog, new tricks?

A new study at York University in Toronto has analyzed the effect of beta blockers on

coronary gene expression in patients with heart failure. Researchers found that beta blockers “largely reverse the pathological pattern of gene expression observed in heart failure.” More research is needed to determine whether beta blockers can be used to protect against heart failure.

3. Tick saliva saving lives?

While ticks are often the subject of nightmares researchers now believe they can lead to a dream solution for myocarditis, heart attack and stroke. Ticks use proteins called ‘evasins’ to escape their host’s detection by blocking the host’s inflammatory response.  Researchers are now isolating these evasins in a ‘bug to drug’ formula.  Hopefully these drugs will be able treat a variety of inflammatory diseases.

At ENCORE Research Group we conduct cutting edge research similar to those seen above.  While we do not have any ‘bug to drug’ studies at this time, we do have a heart failure study involving a new use for an already FDA approved medication.  If you are interested in learning more about our current studies visit our “Enrolling Studies” tab at the top of the page.

 


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