Congestive Heart Failure

Congestive Heart Failure
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Introduction
Congestive heart failure is a medical condition in which the heart cannot pump enough blood into the rest of the body (Hosenpud and Greenberg, 2007). The human circulatory system is responsible for supplying oxygen and other absorbed substances from the gastrointestinal tract to the body tissue, the above substances uses blood as the main medium of transport of the essential components. Blood is pumped through the closed system of the body vessels by the heart from the left ventricles to the arteries and arterioles to the capillaries were it equates to the interstitial fluids. The forward motion of the blood is attributed to the pumping action of the heart. Therefore due to the heart inability to carry out its physiological functions effectively, the body tissues are not going to get blood and oxygen in as needed hence impairing normal physiological functions.
Congestive heart failure pathophysiology
Congestive heart failure is mainly as a result of the factors that hinder the efficiency of the myocardium through damages such as their overloading. Other abnormalities that can cause congestive heart failure include volume overload, cardiac muscle diseases or excessive demand from the peripheral organs on the heart leading to high output failure (Marieb, 2006). Normally as seen in other disease heart failure conditions, the heart muscle, that is the myocardium reduce their contractility and as a result there is reduction in cardiac output compared to the peripheral body tissue demand. The major determinants of cardiac output in the human cardiovascular system are preload, contractility and afterload which constitute the stroke volume and the heart rate. The mechanism of cardiac output reduction and heart failure occur through two major mechanisms, these mechanisms include systolic dysfunction and the systolic dysfunctions. Systolic dysfunction is characterized by decreased ejection fraction resulting to a less than 50% left ventricular ejection. The other most common causes of this kind of cardiac dysfunction are ischemic heart disease, hypertension and valvular heart disease. Systolic dysfunction is therefore mainly a result of destroyed or dysfunctional cardiac myocytes. In systolic dysfunctions, there is therefore a reduction in stroke volume due to weak ventricular contractions. Diastolic dysfunctions as the name suggest is as result of diastolic ventricles failure to relax, the left ventricles to be more specifically fill up with preserved systolic function. In this kind of cardiac dysfunction, the ejection fractions are usually initially maintained but as the myocardium elasticity reduction so does the diastole reduced. The resultant impact is inadequate stroke volumes coupled with cardiac remodeling and sodium ions and water retention. The major causes of diastolic dysfunctions include hypertension, ischem...