Congestive heart failure

Of all the cardiac events mentioned in the Overall cardiovascular risk section, CHF deserves a special section of its own. That is for three main reasons:

• CHF is the most common cause of hospital admission in developed countries
• Its cost of management is very high, accounting for up to 2% of total healthcare expenditures
• Its cost of diagnosis is also very high, requiring expensive echocardiograms to be performed, read, and interpreted by specialized personnel and physicians (Tripoliti et al., 2016)

Diagnosing CHF

While CHF can be deemed probable in patients with particular symptoms, risk factors, electrocardiogram findings, and laboratory results, a definitive diagnosis can only be made through echocardiography or a cardiac MRI. Echocardiography requires skilled personnel to administer the test, and then a specialist physician (usually a cardiologist or radiologist) must read the study and visually assess how well the heart is pumping. This is usually done by estimating...