AI Article Synopsis

  • Heart failure management still faces significant challenges, including high hospitalization rates and poor quality of life, partly due to cognitive deficits in 30% to 50% of affected patients.
  • Effective self-care in heart failure patients relies on their ability to make informed decisions about symptoms, which is complicated by neural alterations in areas of the brain responsible for decision-making.
  • Research is needed to understand how these cognitive impairments impact patients' learning, perception, interpretation, and response to symptoms, ultimately affecting their self-care behaviors.

Article Abstract

Background: Despite advances in management, heart failure is associated with high rates of hospitalization, poor quality of life, and early death. Education intended to improve patients' abilities to care for themselves is an integral component of disease management programs. True self-care requires that patients make decisions about symptoms, but the cognitive deficits documented in 30% to 50% of the heart failure population may make daily decision making challenging. After describing heart failure self-care as a naturalistic decision making process, we explore cognitive deficits known to exist in persons with heart failure. Problems in heart failure self-care are analyzed in relation to neural alterations associated with heart failure. As a neural process, decision making has been traced to regions of the prefrontal cortex, the same areas that are affected by ischemia, infarction, and hypoxemia in heart failure. Resulting deficits in memory, attention, and executive function may impair the perception and interpretation of early symptoms and reasoning and, thereby, delay early treatment implementation.

Conclusions: There is compelling evidence that the neural processes critical to decision making are located in the same structures that are affected by heart failure. Because self-care requires the cognitive ability to learn, perceive, interpret, and respond, research is needed to discern how neural deficits affects these abilities, decision-making, and self-care behaviors.

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Source
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ahj.2007.04.058DOI Listing

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