Heart Failure With Preserved Ejection Fraction: New Treatments Provide 'Hope'

This transcript has been edited for clarity.

Clyde W. Yancy, MD, MSc: Hello. This is Clyde Yancy, professor and chief of cardiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine and a longtime investigator and an author for the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guideline for the management of heart failure.

I'm delighted to have one of my rising-star colleagues with me today, Ravi Patel. Dr Patel has expressed and is executing a really profound interest in heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF). We're taking advantage of his expertise and his growing awareness of this condition, as well as the benefit of his lens, which really formulates what the next generation anticipates in the treatment of patients with all forms of heart failure — in this case, we focus on HFpEF. As our discussant, Dr Patel will help us profile what we understand to be new and different about the treatment of HFpEF. Let me set things up.

We have the benefit now of a new universal definitionthat helps us understand who has heart failure and who doesn't. Importantly, it once again partitions heart failure according to the ejection fraction. This is a very important discussion. This isn't a nuance.