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It’s impossible to overstate the importance of your heart health, which influences every area of your overall health and wellness. Looking at it from another angle, heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, so it’s one area on which you need to focus.
To that end, we want to look at heart failure, which affects about 6.7 million Americans over the age of 20. More worrisome is the fact that this number is expected to jump to 11.4 million by 2050. Furthermore, about one-third of adults in the US are at risk for heart failure.
Given those eye-opening numbers, board-certified cardiologist Dr. Satjit Bhusri and the team at Upper East Side Cardiology want to devote this month’s blog post to signs of heart failure.
Without further ado, let’s jump in.
A quick word about heart failure
Before we address the signs of heart failure, we want to briefly describe what this condition entails.
In the simplest of terms, heart failure is a condition in which your heart struggles to pump blood efficiently. Under normal circumstances, the average heart beats 60-100 times a minute to circulate your blood through your lungs to pick up oxygen, which it then delivers to almost every cell in your body.
So, when you have heart failure, your body isn’t circulating oxygenated blood throughout your body as it should, which can lead to issues that we get into next.
Early signs of heart failure
As you might imagine, the signs of heart failure aren’t exactly subtle if your body is deprived of oxygen thanks to a poorly functioning heart. Some of the first signs of a brewing problem include:
Shortness of breath
With heart failure, your blood can stagnate in your lungs, which can lead to shortness of breath. At first, you might experience this shortness of breath when you exercise. Over time, this symptom can get worse, and you may struggle to breathe even at rest. In fact, many people experience shortness of breath at night, when they’re lying down.
Coughing and wheezing
Thanks to the buildup of fluids in your lungs due to heart failure, you might find yourself coughing and wheezing.
Edema
If your blood isn’t circulating well, it can pool in your legs, leading to edema, the medical term for fluid buildup. When blood pools, it pushes fluids out of your blood vessels and into neighboring tissues, creating puffy feet, ankles, and lower legs.
This can also happen around your abdomen, which is why many people with heart failure have swollen bellies.
Fatigue
As you might imagine, if your heart isn’t functioning well and pushing oxygen out into your body promptly, you can experience considerable fatigue.
Digestive issues
With less blood flow, you may experience gastrointestinal issues, such as nausea and lack of appetite.
Heart palpitations
As your heart struggles to pump, you might feel this struggle in the form of heart palpitations, or the feeling like your heart is racing or pounding.
If you recognize any of these signs and there’s no obvious reason behind the symptom, we want you to see us right away. Though heart failure can’t be reversed, it can be slowed and managed, allowing millions of people to live long, happy lives.
For expert diagnosis and care of heart failure, please call our New York City office on the Upper East Side of Manhattan at 212-752-3464. You can also request more information online by clicking here.