Northwestern Memorial’s Bluhm Cardiovascular Institute is one of seven programs in the country participating in new study aimed at improving the heart’s pumping action and helping to manage congestive heart failure symptoms.

Elderly patients diagnosed with congestive heart failure who receive implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) for primary prevention of sudden cardiac death live longer than those that do not, according to researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Medicine. Further, the health care costs associated with ICDs, while substantial at the time of implantation, do not greatly increase downstream health care costs in this population.

Medical breakthroughs in recent decades have allowed heart attack survivors and other heart-disease patients to live longer. But as their hearts decline into congestive heart failure, an increasing number will experience disability and the need for nursing-home care.

Researchers at Johns Hopkins have evidence to explain why the supposedly natural act of aging is by itself a very potent risk factor for life-threatening heart failure.

Congestive heart failure rarely occurs among leukemia patients who take imatinib, researchers at The University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center found after an exhaustive review of the detailed medical histories of 1,276 patients who enrolled in clinical trials for the drug.

A strong work ethic and sense of place appear to influence how elderly rural Albertans with congestive heart failure manage their illness, in that these values may delay them from seeking help at critical times, a University of Alberta study shows.

American doctors are starting a dramatic experiment this month to try to save patients dying from congestive heart failure by temporarily resting their hearts, then boosting them with a drug long abused for bodybuilding.

Heart researchers at the Center for Translational Medicine at Jefferson Medical College have used gene therapy to reverse heart failure in animals. In addition, they found that this gene therapy strategy had "unique and additive effects" to currently used, standard heart failure drugs called beta-blockers.