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Equally Serious Threats

Per Hildebrandt, MD, DMSc

JAMA. 2006;296:2259-2260.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Heart failure is a common disease with increasing prevalence, accounting for an estimated 1.1 million hospitalizations annually in the United States.¹ Despite development of effective treatments, including -blockers, angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors, spironolactone, defibrillators, and cardiac resynchronization, heart failure remains a serious disease and is associated with a poor prognosis.²

Clinical heart failure can occur with reduced systolic function, typically defined as a left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) of less than 40% and not more than 55% or with preserved LVEF (or nonsystolic heart failure). With modern imaging techniques, LVEF is relatively easy to measure but clinical heart failure is much more difficult to define precisely. This is an important issue because use of an imprecise definition of clinical heart failure may result in many patients with preserved LVEF being incorrectly diagnosed with heart failure.³ Although heart failure with preserved LVEF is generally considered to be primarily . . . [Full Text of this Article]

Author Affiliation: Departments of Medicine and Cardiology, Roskilde University Hospital, Roskilde, Denmark.

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