Introduction

Abstract

A definition of heart failure depends on your perspective: as a clinician, a state of circulatory congestion; as an epidemiologist, an accelerating public health problem; as a physiologist, a decompensation of the circulation secondary to primary changes in the heart and subsequent changes in the vasculature; as a molecular biologist, a maladaptive response to biologic factors affecting the cardiac and vascular cell growth cycle; as a patient, a long-term disabling condition with uncertain survival.