Dr. Bertram Pitt is lead author of that study. He is a cardiologist at the University of Michigan Medical Center. Dr. Pitt, welcome. First, let's begin with some basics here. Tell us what heart failure is in the simplest terms.
Heart failure is an inability of the heart to pump blood or meet the needs of the body.
And often when that heart can't do that, fluid builds up in the heart and goes out into the lungs and the patient suffers from shortness of breath and may often have swelling of the legs and their exercise is very limited. There are many causes. So, as we have an increasingly elderly population, we're going to see more and more people suffer from heart failure. Well, the ace inhibitors have been very successful in reducing mortality but even with the standard therapy, the ace inhibitors, the diuretics, and digoxen, people with severe heart failure still have a very high death rate. So that's worse than many cancers.