Making sense of acute heart failure

Acute heart failure–the rapid onset of symptoms and signs secondary to abnormal cardiac function–may occur as new-onset symptoms in a patient without previous known cardiac dysfunction or as acute decompensation of chronic heart failure. Both presentations are often life-threatening and require urgent treatment. Acute heart failure was therefore the ideal focus for the recent annual meeting of the British Society for Heart Failure, which took place in London in November 2013.