Welcome to Dr Warrick's Podcast Channel. Warrick is a practising cardiologist and author with a passion for improving care by helping patients understand their heart health through education work believes educated patients get the best health care to discover and understand the latest approaches and technology in heart care and how this might apply to you or someone you love.

Hi, my name's Dr Warrick Bishop, and welcome to my Healthy Heart Minute. Today, a quick word on how we diagnose and investigate cardiac failure.  

Well, in general terms, like anything in medicine, we undertake history and examination. The history may well be one of shortness of breath, particularly on exertion, but sometimes on lying flat or being woken in the middle of the night with shortness of breath. There may be a history of swelling of ankles. These features, particularly shortness of breath and swelling, points us towards cardiac failure. We would then get on and we'd undertake an examination listening for signs of fluid retention in the lungs. We'd look for that in the ankles and we can even look at the neck to give us an idea of the amount of fluid in someone's body. There are other things we can do, like ECGs and chest X-rays to start to build a picture and then we go from there.

If you're interested to know more about what we can do for diagnosis and investigation of cardiac failure I've done a podcast on the very topic. The link is below. Please click on that and have a listen.

Till then, I hope you enjoy it. I wish you the very best. Take care and bye for now.

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