Diastolic Heart Failure

Diastolic heart failure or diastolic dysfunction refers to decline in performance of one (usually the left ventricle) or both (left and right) ventricles of the heart during the time phase of diastole. Diastole is that phase of the cardiac cycle when the heart is not contracting to propel blood out (systole) to the body, brain and lungs but instead is relaxing and filling with incoming blood that is being returned from the body through the inferior vena cava (IVC) from the lungs through the pulmonary veins and from the brain through the superior vena cava (SVC).

Read more about Diastolic Heart Failure:  Physiology of Diastolic Dysfunction, Pathophysiology, Risk Factors and Causes, Diagnosis, Treatment, Prognosis

Famous quotes containing the words heart and/or failure:

    Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
    Whispers the o’er-fraught heart and bids it break.
    William Shakespeare (1564–1616)

    ... how have I used rivers, how have I used wars
    to escape writing of the worst thing of all—
    not the crimes of other, not even our own death,
    but the failure to want our freedom passionately enough
    so that blighted elms, sick rivers, massacres would seem
    mere emblems of that desecration of ourselves?
    Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)