Welcome to Dr. Warrick's podcast channel. Warrick is a practicing cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education. Warrick believes educated patients get the best health care. Discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love. Hi, you may have been told you've got cardiac failure or you may know someone who's been told they've got cardiac failure. Well, that term failure really rings fear into the hearts of many people as you might imagine. So what does cardiac failure mean? Well, my name is Dr. Eric Bishop. I'm a cardiologist and I'd like to talk a little bit more about what cardiac failure is all about. Well, it tends to be manifest in most patients by the symptoms of shortness of breath, mostly early on exertion, but sometimes at rest, with a combination of swelling and fluid retention, beginning generally in the feet and the ankles and perhaps progressing subsequently. So most often cardiac failure will be one or other or both of shortness of breath and swelling. We will see it more commonly as people age. We will see it more commonly in people who have other heart issues, whether they've had bypass grafting or a previous heart attack or hypertension or some sort of surgery on their hearts. We look at cardiac failure as an abnormal physiological response because the heart stops pumping properly and therefore the volume going through the circulation is diminished. Now, the really interesting thing about that is that the body has receptors, sensors within the blood vessels that tell it that there's not enough blood being pumped. Well, because our bodies evolved millions of years ago on the African plains, when the main cause of us not having enough blood pumping through our bodies was loss of blood, the body retains fluid. So suddenly we've now got a situation where our heart is not pumping properly and it needs all the help it can get and the body thinks that we've lost fluid so it's retaining fluid which is going to overload that heart that's not pumping properly even further. I think you can start to see the beginning of a downward spiral. So how do we treat Heart failure. Well of course we do a lot of investigations and tests but in essence when we come to therapy or treatment we're looking to support the heart and its function and we're looking to remove fluid. This is really a complex area because the heart can fail in two main ways. One way it fails is if it doesn't contract properly. If for some reason it has a reduced compression. But the heart can also fail if it fails to relax properly. Think of a stiff bladder, think of a stiff leg through exercise, think of a chamber that just doesn't give way as blood comes into it. So a complex condition with different ways that the heart can fail generally. If you've got cardiac failure, you will need to see a cardiologist to sort you out. But if you don't have cardiac failure, my best advice is try to avoid it. Keep a healthy lifestyle. Keep regular exercise. Keep your blood pressure down. Keep your cardiovascular risks down. Because the best therapy for cardiac failure is to avoid it in the first place. I've got a piece written on that very topic right below. Please enjoy that. I wish you the very best. Take care and bye for now. You have been listening to another podcast from Dr. Warrick. Visit his website at drWarrickbishop.com for the latest news on heart disease. If you love this podcast, feel free to leave us a review.