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Ernest N. Curtis's avatar

Being retired for a number of years and not very interested in keeping up with the new terminology, can someone explain to me why heart failure with a normal ejection fraction is called heart failure? This appears to be an old and proven pharma strategy: develop and market a new drug that has a marginal effect in a study to replace an older drug that has the same marginal effect but most importantly has gone off patent.

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Palaniappan Muthappan's avatar

Volume overload with relatively normal kidney and liver function. We tend to pin this on the heart. Often it’s related to stiff and inelastic myocardium (poor diastolic function) but it’s also become somewhat of a grab bag term.

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Ernest N. Curtis's avatar

Thank you. That is pretty much what I suspected---some sort of cardiomyopathy that restricted diastolic filling. In almost 40 years of practice, I can't recall ever seeing this. Some severe hypertensives might have enough LVH to give this sort of problem, but they almost always had significant renal dysfunction as well.

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