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:
“What’s past and what’s to come is strewed with husks
And formless ruin of oblivion;
But in this extant moment, faith and truth,
Strained purely from all hollow bias-drawing,
Bids thee, with most divine integrity,
From heart of very heart, great Hector, welcome!”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“War is bestowed like electroshock on the depressive nation; thousands of volts jolting the system, an artificial galvanizing, one effect of which is loss of memory. War comes at the end of the twentieth century as absolute failure of imagination, scientific and political. That a war can be represented as helping a people to “feel good” about themselves, their country, is a measure of that failure.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)