If a heart attack leads to heart failure. The resulting edema is due to blood backing up in the vessels, but do the valves function as normal?
Meaning do the ventricles and atriums get filled as normal and the blood doesn’t flow backwards. But they don’t get fully emptied, due to the heart’s diminished pumping/contraction strength, and as a result of their partial emptying, when they do get filled again, they eventually “overflow” and hence the blood backs up resulting in edema?
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Not usually. Heart failure is the decrease in the strength that heart contractions occur. When a contraction occurs in a CHF patient, they eject a very small percentage of the blood in the ventricle. Meanwhile there is still blood headed towards the heart through the venous system. That blood has to go somewhere. If the failure is on the right side of the heart, the blood back flows towards the venous system and because of gravity, the feet swell. If it’s left-sided heart failure, the blood back flows from the left atrium towards the lungs, which is why CHF patients have trouble breathing. When they have a hypertensive crisis, their breathing can get really bad really quickly because suddenly that pressure is being exerted across the alveolar membranes and your lungs really start filling up with fluid.
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