Heart Failure Patient Assessment

"Heart failure is a chronic progressive disease in which the myocardium is unable to extract sufficient blood to meet the demands of the body's blood and oxygen" (American Heart Association, 2012, paragraph 3). This basically means that the body functions in a way that the mind can not catch up with. Although heart failure may be acute and sudden, it usually develops over time and is a chronic or chronic condition. There are two different types of heart failure, left and right, which can be caused by other diseases such as diabetes, coronary heart disease or hypertension (National Institutes of Health, 2012).

Heart failure patients may experience thirst. However, there is no way to measure this condition in heart failure patients. The purpose of this study was to develop a stress scale of thirst for heart failure patients (TDS - HF) and to evaluate the psychometric characteristics of the scale. TDS-HF was developed to measure the thirst of heart failure patients. Confirmation of the validity of the face and contents using a panel of experts including patients and medical experts collected TDS-HF data from patients with heart failure in Sweden, the Netherlands and Japan outpatient heart failure clinic and hospital. Psychometric features were evaluated using data from 256 heart failure patients (72 ± 11 years old). Using the mouth thirst strength visual analog scale, the simultaneous validity of the scale was evaluated. The patient did not encounter any difficulties to answer the question, and the time to answer the question was about 5 minutes.

In a study of 149 patients with progressive congestive heart failure with heart failure, half were treated with infra-red sauna and half were treated with control. After only 10 days of infrared treatment, these patients go further and breath better, show chest x-rays and more healthy heart through laboratory measurements, and eliminate side effects. In a Finnish project called Blood Pressure Sauna and Cardiovascular Health Project, 102 participants with at least one risk of heart disease need only a 30 minute Finnish steam sauna. After sauna treatment, the systolic blood pressure decreased from 137 mmHg to 130 mmHg and the diastolic blood pressure decreased from 82 mmHg to 75 mmHg

Throughout the year, 900 people with heart failure asked researchers to upload software to the implanted defibrillators of each patient. HeartLogicTM Heart Failure Diagnostic Service uploads software to monitor patient's heart rate, activity, electrical activity. The most important thing is to act as a sensor to predict imminent heart failure. During the study, the sensor kit detected 70% of heart failure events. In most cases, the event was detected more than a month before the event. The result far exceeds the target of 40% of researcher's detection, and erroneous detection is within the allowable range.