Congestive Heart Failure Treatment

You should clearly understand that congestive heart failure treatment is a team effort. Your team may consist of your doctors, social workers, pharmacists, nurse, dietitians or even exercise professionals. Your team will encourage you to get successfully result of your treatment.

You may also like to read the previous article about prognosis of congestive heart failure, before continuing!

However, the success of the treatment is closely dependent on your own! In other words, although there are a lot of members of your team but the key player is ‘YOU’. So, you have a big role to play the goal success of the treatment, which including your effort to change your lifestyles become positive healthy lifestyles, stay focus on your follow-up appointments, be always active in the team, take appropriately your medicine, make your dietary changes, and so on!

How to prevent the congestive heart failure from worsening?

One of big challenges in congestive heart failure treatment is what you should do to prevent the disease from worsening! Well, the following are some helpful tips for this issue:

1. If you have congestive heart failure, you may need to make appointments with your doctor! Make these appointments become more organized by scheduling your appointments! For every follow-up visits, doctor usually will ensure that the disease is not getting worse. If you have any questions, don’t forget to write them down so thus you will not miss any question and you can ask to your doctor for the answer of your questions during follow-up visits.
2. Monitor the progress of your symptoms! Check regularly your own symptoms, particularly such as the weight of your body and other swelling symptoms in order to analyze the changes in your fluid status! If you experience new symptoms or even if your symptoms are getting severe, then you have to call your doctor immediately. Don’t ever wait for your signs become so severe!
3. Be careful when eating sodium or salt! You have to limit the intake of sodium! As well we know that sodium or salt is easy to be found naturally in foods. It is familiar used to make certain foods last longer or just for flavoring. Talk with your dietitian or doctor about low-sodium diet! If you can follow well all instructions of this diet from your dietitian, you can help your body to get less fluid retention, breath-easier, or less swelling.
4. Take appropriately your medications as prescribed. It is so important to do all instructions from your doctor, including your medications as prescribed. Many medications of heart failure are used to reduce the release of harmful hormones and improve the performance of the heart to pump blood.
5. As mentioned before, check your weight regularly and do a proper diet if necessary. Don’t forget also to ask about ‘dry’ weight! It is usually your weight without involving extra fluid (water) in your body. In many cases, your dietitian usually recommends to maintain the weight within ‘4 pounds’ of your dry weight. Talk with your dietitian for more detailed information!
6. One of crucial things in congestive heart failure treatment is the fluid balance. Therefore, keep well the fluid balance of your body! Many doctors usually ask their patients to keep a record of the fluids to drink or eat. The calculation of the fluid balance may be different from person to person, therefore ask to your doctor to get more clearly advices! Always keep in mind that more amounts of fluid (water) that are carried into the blood vessels will make the heart work harder to pump excess fluid (water) through the body.
7. And always remember to maintain your blood pressure low! This is important to help the heart to pump blood without extra stress.

Surgeries for congestive heart failure treatment!

There are several types of surgery to eliminate further damage to heart! These surgeries are also helpful to improve the function or performance of the heart. The procedures used for these surgeries may include:

1. Bypass surgery, it is one of the most common surgeries to treat heart failure. Generally, doctor will recommend it if the patient has blockages that are able to be passed.
2. For diseased heart valves, balloon valvuloplasty (non-surgically) and traditional heart valve surgery (surgically option) are some of popular choices for the treatment.
3. LVAD (Implantable left ventricular assist device)! It can be considered in people with heart failure who are hospitalized with severe systolic & has not responded to other treatments.
4. And when the condition is so severe and other treatments or therapies cannot work well, doctor may consider choosing ‘heart transplant surgery’.

Once again, talk with your doctor for more detailed information and advices about congestive heart failure treatments that you should choose!

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