Heart failure is a cause of significant burden to both individuals and society. Individuals live with a disease where there is a decline in physical functioning, the experience of a range of symptoms including breathlessness and pain, frequent hospitalisations and death. The frequent hospital admissions that are usually precipitated by shortness of breath places an economic burden on the current health system. This burden of heart failure is expected to increase in the coming years due to factors such as the ageing population and improved survival from acute cardiac events. This current and predicted continuing burden has been recognised by the health system and has resulted in significant improvement in the pharmacotherapy and nonpharmacotherapy treatment of heart failure. Despite this improvement and with the exception of those few who receive cardiac transplantation, there is no cure for heart failure. Whist the advances in therapy have promoted significant improvements in heart failure management, symptoms including breathlessness (dyspnoea) remain a major issue. The Management of Dyspnoea in Advanced Heart Failure project explored and assessed the current therapeutic management of dyspnoea in advanced heart failure and examined two potential therapeutic options namely nebulised frusemide and long-term oxygen therapy. Following a comprehensive review of the nebulised frusemide literature, The Haemodynamic Effects of Nebulised Frusemide in Heart Failure study showed that nebulised frusemide did have an impact on the haemodynamic parameters of participants. Whilst many consider oxygen therapy as a common sense approach for breathlessness, the lack of scientific evidence for its use in chronic breathlessness with people who have normal or mildly low oxygen levels has prevented funding to supply oxygen therapy to this group of patients. The O2 Breathe Study is a palliative care study that is testing long-term home oxygen therapy versus medical air in patients who do meet the current funding arrangements. The analysis of the screening data showed that the symptom burden as a result of dyspnoea is similar to that seen in cancer and respiratory patients, and heart failure patients had lower levels of physical functioning than the respiratory group. Whilst the design of the studies in this thesis will not allow conclusions to be made regarding their efficacy for dyspnoea management in heart failure, they have provided preliminary data and hypotheses to be tested in the future. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/204825 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Newton, Phillip J., University of Western Sydney, College of Health and Science, School of Nursing |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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