This is part 6 in a series looking at physician performance at finding asymptomatic disease. As usual, most docs get symptomatic disease, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. Congestive failure is most often due to decades of high blood pressure. Another common cause is injury to the left ventricle muscle due to heart attacks. My dad died from this. There are ways to screen for this. A key one is cardiac doppler or ultrasound. I go into some details, including diastolic failure and low ejection fraction. Often the big difference between doctor performance has more to do with his/her back-up support, like a good quality team, compensation for performance in prevention, and - patient awareness.
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