Highlights the emerging need for ethical analysis in heart failure management, particularly regarding end-of-life care, new therapies, and research.
Ethical analysis warrants routine consideration in HF end-of-life decisions and novel therapies; leaves open dedicated empirical research to guide integration.
Modern therapies in cardiovascular medicine aim at preventing death and improving patients' quality of life. However, cardiologists often focus on what can be done rather than what should be done, and the latter consideration may be neglected in the midst of therapeutic optimism. The life-saving success of cardiovascular treatments, combined with an aging population, has created an epidemic of heart failure, a disease that portends considerable morbidity and mortality and raises important questions about what should be done. This and the following essays in this section address the emerging need for ethical analysis of issues raised by patients with heart failure. In this overview, we discuss end-of-life care in end-stage heart failure, new therapies for heart failure, and heart failure research.
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Kirkpatrick et al. (2006) studied this question.
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