Helping those with heart failure centres on one word – hope

Helping those with heart failure centres on one word – hope

I love Banksy’s iconic drawing Girl with Balloon — the profile of a little girl releasing (or is she trying to grab it?) the string of a red heart-shaped balloon. I love it, not just because I’m a cardiologist but because it symbolizes hope. That’s something that’s crucial in health care, and particularly in my specialty, heart failure.

Specialists warn that symptoms may be confused with other less serious ailments. Persistent fatigue, difficulty breathing when performing daily activities, swelling of the legs, and unexplained weight gain may be warning signs.

Heart failure is a set of symptoms that translates the inability of the heart to function properly. The symptoms it produces, such as drowning, make simple activities like dressing or showering difficult. This greatly affects social life, prevents the patient from developing work activities, and hospital admissions are very frequent, as Dr. Sonia Mirabet, president of the Association of Heart Failure of the Spanish Society of Cardiology (SEC), e…