Congestive Heart Failure: Fifty Years of Progress

TLDR

Early research in the 1950s–1960s focused on classifying heart failure into filling and emptying disorders, elucidating the role of myocardial hypertrophy in wall stress, and debating mechanisms of pressure‑overload‑induced failure. The study sought to determine whether ventricular pump failure can occur despite normal contractile function of individual myocardial units, implying inadequate contractile mass. The authors used early hemodynamic techniques—including indicator‑dilution cardiac output measurement, digoxin effect studies, and outpatient administration of oral mercuhydrin—to investigate heart failure mechanisms and treatment. They identified norepinephrine as the cardiac adrenergic neurotransmitter and showed that myocardial hypertrophy limits wall stress during overload.

Abstract

Volume 1 of Circulation provides an excellent snapshot of the understanding of the mechanisms and treatment of heart failure a half century ago. During that era, circulatory pathophysiology was at the center of investigative attention. For example, Tinsley Harrison and his group divided heart failure into “primary disorders of filling and primary disorders of emptying,”1 a forerunner of our current terms diastolic and systolic heart failure. The great Swedish clinical physiologist Gustav Nylin used 32P-labeled red blood cells for measuring cardiac output and cardiothoracic blood volume by the indicator-dilution method in normal subjects and in patients with heart failure.2 Andre Cournand’s group defined the pathophysiology of heart failure secondary to cor pulmonale, distinguished it from left ventricular failure, and compared the acute hemodynamic effects of digoxin in these 2 conditions. 2 In a seminal paper, Raab and Lepeschkin extracted sympathin from the heart and established norepinephrine as the cardiac adrenergic neurotransmitter. 4 In one of the earliest efforts to manage patients with chronic congestive heart failure on an outpatient basis, Vander Veer and colleagues demonstrated the effectiveness and tolerability of an oral form of the widely used parenteral diuretic mercuhydrin. 5 In the 1950s, the role of hypertrophy in the heart’s adaptation to hemodynamic overload was examined. After Laplace’s law was applied to the heart and permitted the calculation of wall stress in the human heart,6 it became clear that myocardial hypertrophy prevents excessive elevation of wall stress consequent to hemodynamic overload. 7 8 In the 1960s, there was a lively debate about the mechanism of heart failure secondary to pressure overload. The question was framed as follows: “Does failure of the ventricle as a pump occur in the presence of (an) inadequate contractile mass while the contractile function of each unit (of myocardium) is normal …