Prevalence of Suspected Diastolic Dysfunction in Patients with a Clinical Diagnosis of Congestive Heart Failure

Abstract

Normal LV systolic function was seen in nearly one-half of the echocardiograms with a suspected clinical diagnosis of CHF. Suspected LV diastolic dysfunction was observed in one-third of the echocardiograms with a suspected clinical diagnosis of CHF.

Perception of symptoms is out of proportion to cardiac pathology in patients with "diastolic heart failure"

“…It is possible that an increased BMI was a factor for the perceptions of breathlessness in our DHF patients, but the matched control group had similar BMI and no symptoms. We found that DHF patients were older and more likely to be female than SHF patients (a frequently reported observation in heart failure epidemiology reports) 1 – 3. Previous studies have shown that female CHF patients perceive dyspnoea differently from males 29.…”

“…Epidemiological studies suggest that heart failure with normal ejection fraction (HeFNEF), often labelled “diastolic heart failure” (DHF) is common, and has a prognosis similar to that of systolic heart failure (SHF) 1 – 3. On the face of it, this observation sits oddly with the observation in large trials that increasing left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) is strongly predictive of better outcome in heart failure populations 4 – 6.…”