A “burden” on a daily basis, testifies a patient: heart failure affects 1.5 million French people, but remains poorly known to the public and too little diagnosed according to Health Insurance, which is launching an awareness campaign this Sunday, to identify the signs of warning of this chronic disease.
“If tomorrow in your family someone tells you ‘I have cancer’, everyone will be moved. The same person tells you ‘I have been diagnosed with heart failure’, if there is emotion, it will be a lot less strong”, details Pr Christophe Leclercq, president of the French Society of Cardiology. However, cardiovascular pathologies represent the leading cause of death in the worldand the second in France – a patient dies every 7 minutes from this disease – after cancer, he said at a press conference on Tuesday.
“Many (of French people) do not know what burden heart failure can represent” for patients, testifies Philippe Muller, in his sixties with nearly thirty years of illness, founder of the association for the support of heart failure (SIC). L’shortness of breath at rest or after a few meters of walking, significant weight variations, very great fatigue are then part of the person’s daily life. “Everything becomes complicated, we have to get help for everything”he notes.
What are the early symptoms?
Before arriving at these debilitating symptoms, first signs allow early diagnosis : shortness of breath, even slight, rapid weight gain, edema in the feet or ankles and a feeling of fatigue, detail the representatives of the National Health Insurance Fund (Cnam).
However, only one in five seniors can spontaneously cite one of these four warning signs, whereas those over 60 are the most affected, regretted Thomas Fatôme, Director General of Health Insurance. As a result, between 400,000 and 700,000 French people with heart failure are not diagnosed, he estimates.
On average, doctors evoke the symptoms of heart failure with only 36% of their patients over 60, details Thomas Fatôme. The Cnam will thus work to educate health professionals.
Due to the improvement in life expectancy, heart failure increases with age and it affects 10% of people aged 70 and over. It can be linked to cardiovascular risk factors (tobacco, diabetes, obesity, etc.) For the Cnam, the challenge is “considerable” : the pathology, “heavy, which can be disabling”sometimes leads to seizures called “decompensation”, often requiring hospitalization, explains the general manager.
A solution: “remote monitoring”
The 200,000 annual hospitalizations in connection with this pathology represent 42% of health insurance expenditure devoted to heart failure (which was a total of some 3 billion euros in 2020). And “each hospitalization amplifies the signals of the disease”, emphasizes Philippe Muller. It also increases the risk of death.
Once the disease has been diagnosed, in order to avoid repeated hospitalizations, health professionals recommend cooperative work between nurses, general practitioners, specialists, and hospital teams, in order to ensure follow-up. Another track: remote monitoring. Realized thanks to a connected scale which can detect rapid weight gain, sometimes a harbinger of decompensation, this device is deployed in 15,600 patients with advanced forms of the disease. It should generalize.
As World Heart Day approaches on September 29, the national awareness campaign, under the slogan “Heart failure: what if your heart was trying to tell you something?” will be available in all media, including social networks, from Sunday. Next year, a campaign will be launched on good habits to adopt to the symptoms of the pathology.