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The most recent version of this article was published on 1 February 2009

Heart. Published Online First: 25 November 2008. doi:10.1136/hrt.2008.152686
Copyright © 2008 BMJ Publishing Group Ltd & British Cardiovascular Society

Editorials

Diabetes and prognosis- Are systolic and diastolic heart failure different?

Masoor Kamales 1*

1 Indiana University, United States

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: mkamales{at}iupui.edu.

Accepted 1 July 2008


Abstract

Multiple studies across countries have now shown that the long term prognosis of diastolic heart failure is not very different from that of systolic heart failure (1-3). If that is the case then why bother differentiating the two types of heart failure? The answer is because the treatment options differ greatly between the two conditions. While therapy (drug and device) is well characterized for systolic dysfunction (4), there are precious little data and options available for treating diastolic dysfunction (4). While ejection fractions and left ventricular cavity size differ between the two forms of heart failure, signs and symptoms and neurohumoral abnormalities are very similar between the two. These have been elegantly summarized recently by Chatterjee and Massie (5) (See Table). It has even been proposed that these two forms of heart failure may be different phenotypes of the same pathophysiologic basis (6). The stimuli responsible for these phenotypic differences is largely unknown (5,6,7).


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