Heart failure
failure of the heart to provide sufficient blood flow
Heart failure (HF), also known as congestive heart failure (CHF), is a syndrome caused by an impairment in the heart's ability to fill with and pump blood.
Although symptoms vary based on which side of the heart is affected, HF typically presents with shortness of breath, excessive fatigue, and bilateral leg swelling. The severity of the heart failure is mainly decided based on ejection fraction and also measured by the severity of symptoms. Other conditions that have symptoms similar to heart failure include obesity, kidney failure, liver disease, anemia, and thyroid disease.
Common causes of heart failure include coronary artery disease, heart attack, high blood pressure, atrial fibrillation, valvular heart disease, excessive alcohol consumption, infection, and cardiomyopathy. These cause heart failure by altering the structure or the function of the heart or in some cases both. There are different types of heart failure: right-sided heart failure, which affects the right heart, left-sided heart failure, which affects the left heart, and biventricular heart failure, which affects both sides of the heart. Left-sided heart failure may be present with a reduced ejection fraction or with a preserved ejection fraction. Heart failure is not the same as cardiac arrest, in which blood flow stops completely due to the failure of the heart to pump.
Diagnosis is based on symptoms, physical findings, and echocardiography.
The public source identifies “Heart failure” as failure of the heart to provide sufficient blood flow. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Heart, failure and heart.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q181754. The Library of Congress control number is sh85059745. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Heart failure” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.