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Diastolic heart failure pathophysiology

Visit us (http://www.khanacademy.org/science/healthcare-and-medicine) for health and medicine content or (http://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat) for MCAT related content. These videos do not provide medical advice and are for informational purposes only. The videos are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Always seek the advice of a qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have read or seen in any Khan Academy video. Created by Tanner Marshall.

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  • leafers ultimate style avatar for user HokieHenry
    The video characterizes diastolic heart failure as a decreased filling problem due to a decreased volume. From my understanding, End Diastolic Volume is generally normal; the response to the decreased ventricular volume is higher pressure not less blood volume. This means there is a higher End Diastolic Pressure. The elevated pressure is what causes the fluid to back up in the lungs. Is my understanding of the pathophysiology incorrect?
    (6 votes)
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  • female robot grace style avatar for user Anna
    Hypertrophy can be a good thing. Especially if stroke volume is increased as a result.

    Diastolic heart failure has symmetric hypertrophy just like a strong heart does.

    So how could you tell if hypertrophy is raising or lowering the stroke volume?
    (1 vote)
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    • leafers tree style avatar for user Bravissimo
      Eventually hypertrophy progressed beyond the point of which is it increasing stroke volume. When the heart muscle gets bigger and thicker, it is decreasing the volume inside the ventricle that can be filled with blood. Eventually the ventricle is a big huge stiff muscle with only a small space for blood inside, and the ventricle cannot fill normally during diastole, so the stroke volume gets smaller too. Stroke volume can be measured using an ultrasound of the heart.
      (2 votes)
  • piceratops sapling style avatar for user Noora Elkenawi
    Is Diastolic Failure also called Backward failure? and Systolic failure, Forward failure? because I can't find systolic and diastolic in my book only the other words and I'm guessing might be the same?
    (1 vote)
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    • leaf green style avatar for user Joanne
      https://www.khanacademy.org/science/health-and-medicine/circulatory-system-diseases/heart-failure/v/symptoms-of-left-sided-heart-failure
      These terms are related. Diastolic failure, the inability of the ventricle to fill with blood is often caused by cardiac muscle hypertrophy or thickening. This thickening causes the muscle to stiffen and prevents blood from coming into the heart so then it flows backwards and we see a 'jugular rebound' , associated with right heart failure. Systolic failure is often associated with a dilated cardiomyopathy where the the ventricle muscle becomes thin and floppy. The ventricle fills with blood but cannot effectively contract to push out a normal stroke volume. So, one could say this causes forward failure. These are two of several problems the heart can have that cause poor function or failure. Other issues include coronary artery disease, valve problems , conduction problems and more. I am also going to put another link to other cardiac pages. They may be a bit hard to read at times, but the information is very good. The only negative is there are ads and one must ignore them or avoid following the ads and stay on the physiology pages.
      Best of luck. https://www.cvpharmacology.com/clinical%20topics/heart%20failure-3
      (2 votes)
  • blobby green style avatar for user Mary Mayer
    What’s the difference between stenosis ans sclerosis?
    (1 vote)
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  • blobby green style avatar for user nezamz7218
    Can pulmonary stenosis contribute to diastolic heart failure?
    (1 vote)
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  • starky sapling style avatar for user jonathan
    is diastolic heart failure the same as right sided heart failure? and systolic = left sided heart failure?
    (1 vote)
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Video transcript

- [Voiceover] Diastolic heart failure is similar to systolic heart failure in that the heart doesn't pump enough blood to meet the body's demands. Okay, but how it is different? Well, if you look at diastolic, that kind of clues us into how it's different. And if we remember that diastole is that phase in the cardiac cycle where the heart's just filling with blood, so the heart's all relaxed and blood's filling into the ventricles and that's called diastole. So diastolic failure means that the heart's not filling with enough blood. And so, if you just compare the two, if you just eyeball them, you'll notice how much less room there is with diastolic failure. And if we bring back our most favorite analogy ever, the water bottles, if you squeeze the healthy one, water ejects out, that's great. But with diastolic failure, what if the bottle is not filled with as much water and you squeeze it? Obviously, less water is gonna be ejected 'cause there's less in there in the first place. It's the same thing with the heart. So, if there's less blood in the heart in the first place, it's gonna have a lot harder time meeting the body's demands in ejecting as much blood. So less filled means less ejected. Also, remember how a systolic failure had a lower ejection fraction which is that fraction of blood ejected with each beat. That's because there's about the same amount or possibly even more filled into the ventricles with systolic failure, but there's less ejected. So naturally, you'd have a lower ejection fraction. It makes sense. But since diastolic heart failure has both filled and ejected lower, so both are lower, sometimes your ejection fraction can be the same as with a healthy heart, and we would call that a preserved ejection fraction. Okay, that seems a little confusing, right? Well, let's do an example and show how that might happen. Recall that ejection fraction is equal to your volume ejected, which you can also call your stroke volume, divided by the total blood filled which we can also call end diastolic volume because it's the volume at the end of diastole. Let's say your stroke volume is 70 ml, say your end diastolic volume is 120 ml. This would be considered "healthy"; 70 divided 120 equals 58%. Okay, that's within our normal range. What if stroke volume is equal to 46 ml because of heart failure? It's a lot lower, it's pumping less blood. But your end diastolic volume is also lower, it's 80 ml. Forty-six divided by 80 is still 58%, technically in a normal range. So clearly, the stroke volume and the blood being pumped out is lower, but that's kind of covered up by your end diastolic volume being lower, too. But just because that ejection fraction's preserved, that doesn't mean we're out of the woods. It's still heart failure. But how does this diastolic heart failure get to look so much different than systolic failure? Well, there's pretty much two ways. The first way is hypertrophy which essentially means like growth of muscle. When we're gonna talk about that, we mean ventricular muscle growth. When these grow, they take up more space, and since there's more space being taken up the by muscles, that means there's less space to fill, right? Secondly, is that these muscles, these growing muscles get stiffer. They don't stretch as much when they relax. Even though they're growing, there are these dead muscle cells in here, too, because it's heart failure and that's a main component is death of muscles cells. So these dead muscle cells leave this fibrotic scar tissue and this fibrotic tissue is like a bunch of connective tissue and that connective tissue has a lot lower compliance. Basically, compliance is the ability for the ventricle or for any tissue to passively stretch and expand during filling. This is super important for the heart because more stretch, more compliance means that it can fill more, it could get more blood. Think of like filling a water balloon. When you put water into it, what happens? Well, it gets bigger, it expands. But this is like passive, the water is forcing it to get bigger. Now think about filling up one of those glass flasks from Chemistry class. I mean, I'm gonna be really extreme here just to make a point, but, what's gonna happen when you fill it up is just, it's not gonna get bigger, it's not gonna change shape, it's just gonna fill up all the way and then start to overflow and spill all over. That's because it's a lot less compliant. It's probably one of the least compliant things we can think of. It's the same with the heart with a bunch of fibrous connective tissue. It can't relax and it can't passively expand, and it can't fill completely. So that's what's going on with diastolic heart failure, but how does it get like that and how do we get these enlarged and stiffened muscles? Well, just like systolic failure, it's a secondary disease which means that this growth and stiffening is caused by some kind of underlying disease that's been there before. The big one that we tend to understand the most is chronic hypertension or high blood pressure. So when the pressure in your blood vessels goes up, they become harder to pump against. Harder to pump into. This is kinda like blowing into a straw versus like a big tube. Which one do you think it's gonna be harder to blow air to? It's probably the smaller one, right? Well, it's sort of like that for the heart. Except the heart has to pump blood through these narrowed vessels, and this is way more difficult to do. So what does your heart do? Well, it bulks up. It gains muscle and it gets bigger, so it can pump against these high pressures. Now, both diet and diabetes can both contribute to higher blood pressure and hypertension. Those are definitely big risk factors for hypertension. And therefore, diastolic heart failure. The second underlying disease is aortic stenosis, and stenosis from the systolic heart video we know is a narrowed valve. Specifically, we're gonna talk about this valve right here, this aortic valve. Then that valve goes out from the left ventricle and pumps into an artery called aorta. It's similar to hypertension. It's a lot harder to pump blood through this narrowed opening, as opposed to a valve that's opening all the way. What happens? Well, the heart muscle again bulks up and gains muscle so it can try to pump harder through this smaller valve. Now, this is a little tricky though, right? Because we remember that this can also lead to systolic failure. So, what gives? Well, unfortunately, a lot of the mechanisms behind why in one case it might lead to this growth of muscles like in diastolic heart failure or it might lead to this series weakening of the muscles like in systolic heart failure are pretty complex and honestly, a lot of these mechanisms are unknown in still big areas of research. Next up, we have cardiomyopathies which means heart muscles diseases and sometimes this can be a little general, but for diastolic heart failure in particular, there's two that we're gonna focus on. The first one is hypertrophic cardiomyopathy which we can kinda figure out by the name. Hypertrophic or hypertrophy means muscle growth. This cardiomyopathy causes muscle growth and this is often without an obvious cause. The second is restrictive cardiomyopathy which cases stiffer and more rigid muscles. This restricts the ventricles from expanding. These two cardiomyopathies kinda hit the nail in the head, right? Because with diastolic heart failure, you have either stiffer muscles or enlarged muscles. Finally, there are some other causes and risk factors like old age and coronary artery disease, even, but like I said before, some of these cross path with systolic failure. Again, a lot of the mechanisms behind that are largely unknown. Especially as to why one might lead to systolic failure and one might lead to diastolic failure. These are still big areas of research. With diastolic heart failure, the heart muscles either get bigger, they get stiffened or both. When this happens, less blood fills in to the ventricles and the heart can't passively expand as much and therefore, it can't relax completely. Ultimately, you end up with this cycle that leads to worsening heart failure. So you start with some underlying disease like hypertension or stenosis that makes it a lot harder to pump blood to the body. To try and make it easier, the heart muscles increase in size and they get bigger, and then bulk up. These bigger muscles do more work, so they need more oxygen. But with heart failure, you can't supply more oxygen so this leads to cell death, and that cell death causes this fibrosis and this stiffening of the heart muscle tissue. Then that feeds back into a lower blood supply making it even harder to pump blood. You could also have other diseases like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that directly affects muscle size or restrictive cardiomyopathy that directly affects stiffening. This cycle progresses and heart failure gets worse.