What goes wrong in heart failure?

If you have heart failure, your heart has difficulty pumping blood around your body. This can happen for many reasons – commonly because you have (or had) a medical condition, which has damaged (e.g. coronary heart disease with a heart attack) or placed extra workload (e.g. high blood pressure) on your heart.

This damage or extra workload can either affect the squeezing (contraction) or filling (relaxation) of your heart, or frequently both.

If your heart doesn’t contract as it should, it will not be able to pump sufficient blood in your ventricles out of your heart. If your heart is not able to empty and relax fully, less blood will be able to enter your heart, and therefore less blood is available to pump out of your heart.

Heart failure has two main effects. Firstly, not enough blood is getting to your body, which may cause fatigue. Secondly, blood backs up waiting to enter your heart. This build-up of blood causes fluid to leak out of your blood vessels and into the surrounding tissues. This leads to fluid accumulation (usually in your legs and abdomen) and fluid (congestion) in your lungs.

At first your body will adapt to compensate for your weakened heart’s poor pumping. However, these adaptations can only compensate for a limited time, and in fact, these adaptations can actually make your heart even weaker in the long term.

Click here to find out how your heart and body adapt to try to keep up with your body’s needs.