Jul 23, 2026 · 38 min · 12 segments
Here's a polished version with smoother flow, corrected grammar, and a more engaging, listener-friendly tone: About 80% of Americans living with heart failure are age 65 or older. As we age, the risk…
I don't know the difference between heart failure, heart disease, and a heart attack, and I feel like I sometimes hear these terms being kind of used interchangeably, but they're not the same thing, are they?
Heart disease is sort of an umbrella term we use for problems with the heart valves, the heart arteries, the heart rhythm, the heart muscle, really various parts of the heart.
A heart attack specifically refers to when you have a sudden blockage in the blood supply to the heart muscle, and that's typically what we call myocardial infarction.
Heart failure is more of a clinical syndrome where a heart can't pump strong enough or can't relax easy enough to keep up with the body's needs.
Now, a heart attack can ultimately, with time, cause heart failure, but many patients can develop heart failure without having had a heart attack or for many other reasons which we can delve into as well.
Okay, so three distinct things but all related to each other, and one can lead to the next.
And heart disease is more of an umbrella term, if you want, for all of those things.
So the most common in North America that we think about include high blood pressure, coronary artery disease or coronary artery atherosclerosis, the plaque formation in the arteries that supply the heart muscle, a prior history of heart attacks.
Things like sleep apnea, which also goes sometimes with obesity and high BMIs.
Increasingly in younger patients, we're seeing alcoholism or a drug toxicity, illicit drug use as well.
And on the other end, sometimes other medical conditions like certain cancers that require radiation or chemotherapy in and of itself is a toxin or a risk factor for developing heart failure.
I don't know the difference between heart failure, heart disease, and a heart attack, and I feel like I sometimes hear these terms being kind of used interchangeably, but they're not the same thing, are they?
Heart disease is sort of an umbrella term we use for problems with the heart valves, the heart arteries, the heart rhythm, the heart muscle, really various parts of the heart.
A heart attack specifically refers to when you have a sudden blockage in the blood supply to the heart muscle, and that's typically what we call myocardial infarction.
Heart failure is more of a clinical syndrome where a heart can't pump strong enough or can't relax easy enough to keep up with the body's needs.
Now, a heart attack can ultimately, with time, cause heart failure, but many patients can develop heart failure without having had a heart attack or for many other reasons which we can delve into as well.
Okay, so three distinct things but all related to each other, and one can lead to the next.
And heart disease is more of an umbrella term, if you want, for all of those things.
So the most common in North America that we think about include high blood pressure, coronary artery disease or coronary artery atherosclerosis, the plaque formation in the arteries that supply the heart muscle, a prior history of heart attacks.
Things like sleep apnea, which also goes sometimes with obesity and high BMIs.
Increasingly in younger patients, we're seeing alcoholism or a drug toxicity, illicit drug use as well.
And on the other end, sometimes other medical conditions like certain cancers that require radiation or chemotherapy in and of itself is a toxin or a risk factor for developing heart failure.
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