US NEWS -- About 5 million people in the United States have heart failure, and 300,000 die from it every year. (Compare that with the 570,000 annual deaths caused by every kind of cancer.) Indeed, heart failure—the heart can’t pump enough blood through the body—is the most common reason older folks wind up in the hospital, and more than 1 in 4 heart-failure patients must be hospitalized again within a month of being discharged, according to a recent study in the New England Journal of Medicine. That’s despite the fact, the American Heart Association contends, that most of these rehospitalizations are preventable. “We can take the failure out of heart failure if we use all of the available treatment strategies to the best of our abilities,” says AHA President Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiothoracic transplantation at Baylor University Medical Center in Dallas.
