Get Your Heart Checked if You Feel This in Your Stomach

A very serious issue that is affecting as many as about 6.2 million Americans right now is congestive heart failure or CHF for short. Congestive heart failure is a medical condition in which the person going through it has a heart with a slightly or highly impaired ability to pump blood as it normally would.

According to statistics gathered by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the term heart failure is cited in as many as 14 percent of the death certificates in the U.S. every year and thus making heart failure a leading cause of death for the American people.

Despite it being the leading cause of death within the U.S., there are a lot of people out there who still don’t know any of the symptoms or warning signs that come with heart failure.

Whilst a lot of the symptoms might be rather similar to other heart-related issues such as the symptoms of a heart attack or of coronary artery disease, there are a handful of distinct symptoms that point to none other than heart failure among the vast list of heart-related issues.

As of recently, medical experts have been pointing their fingers at a particular symptom of heart failure that they claim everyone should be wary of. 

The symptom that all these medical professionals and health experts are referring to is abdominal swelling. To understand why this is important and why it’s the symptom we are being told to watch out for, we need to first understand what congestive heart failure is and what it does to a person.

Congestive heart failure takes place when a human’s heart muscle starts to become weak or begins to go stiff, in essence, not allowing for the heart to pump blood as much as it could before and thus losing the heart’s max capacity of pumping blood. 

If this materializes, the lack of pumped blood could cause a whole variety of problems which can include things such as fluid building up in the lungs, to some relatively milder symptoms such as shortness of breath.

However, of all the different problems and symptoms that can arise from congestive heart failure, the main one is that due to the impairment not allowing for the blood to circulate throughout the rest of the body, a build-up of blood occurs in the sufferer’s chest. 

This build-up of fluid can and will slowly make its way down to the person’s abdomen which would cause their stomach to swell up.

The swelling up of the stomach is a clear indicator that if a person is suffering from any heart problem, it is congestive heart failure as other heart-related issues don’t include the symptom of stomach swelling.

It is important to remember that a swollen stomach isn’t an immediate reason to think that you are suffering from congestive heart failure and a visit to the doctor’s office is often recommended before one goes about trying to treat the symptom.