Insuficiência cardíaca : o valor da tomada de decisão apoiada pela evidência

Abstract

© 2020 Sociedade Portuguesa de Cardiologia. Published by Elsevier España, S.L.U. This is an open access article under the CC-BY-NC-ND license.Heart failure (HF) was identified as an emerging epidemic more than two decades ago, and is currently estimated to affect at least 26 million people worldwide. HF is a complex syndrome that is difficult to define, characterized by the heart's inability to meet the body's metabolic demands resulting from structural and/or functional impairment of ventricular filling or ejection. Diagnosis is largely clinical, based on symptoms and signs, for which imaging techniques (particularly echocardiography) and measurement of neurohormonal peptides are crucial. Although in most cases the focus is on symptomatic HF, a proportion of high-risk patients may have no symptoms despite reduced left ventricular ejection fraction, and they may also benefit from medical therapies that favorably impact prognosis.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio