Symptoms
Heart failure manifests itself in a variety of symptoms. First of all, reduced physical resilience, increased fatigue and a feeling of weakness are noticeable. Breathlessness, dizziness and fainting spells may also be indicative of heart failure.
All these symptoms are particularly noticeable during or after physical exertion. The dizziness and fainting spells can also occur if you get up too quickly. As the heart is increasingly too weak to pump the required amount of blood through the circulatory system, a certain amount of fluid is often left in the tissues.
This is expressed by water retention in the legs (also called edema) or by water in the abdomen (ascites). These deposits can lead to a sudden weight gain of several kilograms of body weight or can become slowly noticeable. The blood also accumulates in the vessels leading to the heart, i.e. in the veins.
Blood congestion can also occur in the liver, kidneys or stomach. When lying down (especially at night), when the heart no longer has to pump so strongly against gravity, there may be an increased urge to urinate, since only in this situation are the kidneys sufficiently supplied with blood to produce urine. In the course of the development of heart failure, the blood not only accumulates in the body’s circulation.
The same congestion symptoms also occur in the lungs. Accordingly, fluid accumulates in the lung area. This can lead to coughing with sputum.
If heart failure persists for a long time, the entire lung function can also be negatively affected. As a result, there is increased shortness of breath, and in some cases the lungs are no longer able to bring enough oxygen into the blood, which leads to cyanosis (bluish discoloration of the skin and mucous membranes due to too little oxygen). Why does coughing occur with heart failure?
Although heart failure can initially be caused by high blood pressure, it is possible that low blood pressure values will increasingly occur during the course of the disease. As the disease progresses, the heart is less and less able to pump enough blood into the circulation. When the strength of the heart chambers decreases, it is no longer possible to apply as much pressure as in a healthy heart.
This leads to low blood pressure values and promotes symptoms such as dizziness and fainting spells. Basically, the symptoms do not differ greatly between men and women. Both sexes suffer from reduced resilience, fatigue, weakness, dizziness and fainting spells, as well as water retention and blood congestion in the liver, stomach, kidneys and lungs.
For this reason, it is not possible to make an exact classification of the complaints for the respective sex. However, there are slight tendencies as to which symptoms appear earlier in men and which occur more frequently in women. In general, men usually notice heart failure earlier than women, as the symptoms often become more pronounced.
Men also tend to notice reduced physical resilience and a reduction in general performance as the first symptom. Meanwhile, women are particularly affected by lung-related symptoms. They therefore suffer particularly from shortness of breath and cyanosis due to the reduced oxygen supply to the blood. The symptoms of heart failure are often accompanied by anxiety and depressive moods. These are more common in women than in men.
