Learn More About Congestive Heart Failure
What is heart failure?
The heart is a muscle that pumps blood throughout your body. Heart failure occurs when your heart is not working as well as it should, and it fails to pump blood adequately. This can happen when the arteries become clogged, when high blood pressure is not properly controlled, or when the heart muscle weakens due to an unrecognized infection in the heart.
What are the common symptoms of heart failure?
Some of the common symptoms include:
- shortness of breath
- fatigue
- waking from sleep due to shortness of breath or coughing
- swelling in the legs and feet and weight gain due to fluid that builds up
What are the risk factors?
Heart failure doesn't appear suddenly. It happens over time. Some of the risk factors associated with CHF include:
- coronary artery disease
- past heart attack
- high blood pressure
- lung disease
- heart disease
- infection of the heart or heart valves
- heart damage due to diabetes
- abnormal heart rhythms
Participate and Take Control
If you have been living with congestive heart failure, there are healthy choices you can make on a daily basis to help manage your condition. Learn to identify and act on those factors you can control, by accessing our Congestive Heart Failure Disease Management Program. Help is available for BCBSNM members — call toll-free 1-866-252-8106 for more information about our disease management programs.
Tools and Information
Some of the information below is available in Adobe Acrobat PDF format. If you need Acrobat Reader, download it free of charge from Adobe's site.
- Congestive heart failure information via Personal Health Manager: BCBSNM members can log in to Blue Access for Members to access extensive information on congestive heart failure.
- Congestive heart failure information on other health-related Web sites*:
*We do our best to ensure that the information on the other health-related Web sites listed above is useful, but can't be responsible for the content of those sites or any information you may take from them (please read our legal disclaimer). When you click on a choice above, it will open in a new window so that you can explore that site without having to leave here. When you are through visiting the other site, you can close that window and return to the BCBSNM site.
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