Heart failure: left ventricular systolic dysfunction

Abstract

Heart failure (HF) is a growing problem worldwide and poses an especially large public health burden. It represents a new epidemic of cardiovascular disease, affecting nearly 5.8 million people in the United States, and over 23 million worldwide. Nevertheless, in Europe, fears of an impending HF ‘epidemic’ could not be confirmed in this analysis of trends in prevalence for the period 1990-2007 in patients hospitalized with HF in Sweden. An overall slight decrease in age-adjusted prevalence was observed from 2002. The prevalence in patients under 65 years increased markedly. In absolute numbers, there was a substantial increase among the very old, consistent with demographic changes. The complexity of left ventricular function(s) assessment in HF patients is related to the complexity of heart anatomy, but also to the complexity of electromechanical interaction, and to the load dependency of all the parameters that could be applied in clinical practice.