New Delhi. A form of heart failure that is too often overlooked is on the rise and it‘s just as deadly as the better–known variety. The standard description of heart failure is that the heart progressively loses its ability to pump blood. But there‘s another form of the disease where the heart‘s blood–pumping ability remains near normal, said Dr. K K Aggarwal President, Heart Care Foundation of India and Editor eMedinewS.

In this condition, the heart muscle becomes thickened making the inside chamber of the heart smaller. The heart is thus unable to relax to accommodate the blood it needs to pump out. As there is no room for the heart to relax, the blood backs up into the lungs.

This kind of aberration isn‘t picked up by standard measurements in echocardiography of "ejection fraction"- the percentage of blood in the heart that goes out with every beat. This heart failure is called "heart failure with normal ejection fractions or with normal LV functions". Nearly one–third of heart–failure patients will have normal ejection fraction. However, the death rate for this kind of heart failure matches that of patients with the more common form of heart failure with low ejection fraction and with more than 20% of all the patients dying within a year.

For patients, the symptoms of both types of heart failure are the same: Shortness of breath, difficulty exercising, and fluid retention in the body. Doctors cannot make a diagnosis on the basis of symptoms or routine examinations. A tissue Doppler echocardiogram is needed to see the heart pumping, its ejection fraction and diastolic relaxing functions of the heart. Advances have been made against systolic heart failure, in which the ejection fraction falls below normal but not much has been done about diastolic heart failure.