Heart Failure: A Comprehensive Guide to Pathophysiology and Clinical Care, ISBN-13: 978-1447142188

This book elucidates the etiology of heart failure (HF) to assist understanding in the clinical therapies available.  It explains these in light of the better understanding of the pathophysiology of HF, which has translated into dramatic improvements in patient outcome.

The chapters detail the causes, diagnosis and treatment of HF, and recognize that having become the leading cause of morbidity, mortality and hospitalization in the developed world, even patients with the most advanced HF have options that allow prolonged survival. This includes alternatives to cardiac transplantation, including mechanical circulatory support with a rapidly growing number of new, smaller, more reliable devices becoming available.

Heart Failure: A Comprehensive Guide to Pathophysiology and Clinical Care will be critical reading for all involved in the management of these patients and provides a scientific and clinical reference for trainees in cardiovascular disease as well as physicians involved in caring for these patients.

This comprehensively covers everything from pathophysiology to the evaluation of patients presenting with heart failure to medical management, device therapy, heart transplantation and mechanical circulatory support, and include relevant cardiac imaging studies such as echocardiograms and magnetic resonance imaging studies which could be seen in their entirety as well as pathology slides, hemodynamic tracings and videos of cardiac surgery such as heart transplants and ventricular assist device implantation. Finally, the book would have videos of patients with heart failure, heart transplants or ventricular assist devices, describing their clinical presentation and experiences. It is structured so that it can be used as a guide by physicians studying for the general Cardiology or Advanced Heart Failure and Cardiac Transplantations Boards.

Howard Eisen, Chief of the Division of Cardiology, Drexel University College of Medicine, Philadelphia, PA, USA