Chapters Transcript Video Cardiac Amyloidosis Symptoms, Diagnosis and Treatment Options Cardiac amyloidosis is a disease that affects the heart. It's a protein that is produced by the liver and is accumulating in the heart muscle, making it stiff and that will produce symptoms, for example, of heart failure like fatigue, weakness, uh, fluid like congestion, and those symptoms will have to prompt the patient to have an evaluation with a provider. Usually, the initial workup will include an electrocardiogram, an echocardiogram, and based on those results that will trigger based on the physical exam and the results, multiple testing, for example, a cardiac MRI, blood test, urine test, and with that information, we can decide if we need a specific test called nuclear medicine, it's a pyrophosphate scan. And with all these tests, we can decide what type of amyloidosis the patient has, and based on those results, we can tailor the therapy. But it's important to get diagnosed on time because we can prevent damage to the heart and other organs and now we have therapies sometimes the cardiac amyloidosis that comes from the liver will require some medicines like pills that you can. You can take once a day or some other therapies like injections that you can take once every 3 months. Those medicines will make you feel better and will prolong your life and definitely will improve the heart failure symptoms. So the risk factors for cardiac amyloidosis include age, so the older you are, the higher the risk. Patients who are male have the disease more frequently. Patients that have a thick heart, so that's we call concentric left ventricular hypertrophy, patients with arrhythmias, patients with neurological disease, like for example, carpal tunnel syndrome, for example, lumbar spinal stenosis, uh, neuropathies, and so the Group of these symptoms and signs will trigger your evaluation and hopefully with that information your therapy. The treatment of the amyloidosis is at this point, uh, medical therapy for the rest of their life so we can keep the patients out of the hospital with a good quality of life. At this point we don't have a cure. Um, but we have options in terms of, uh, different medicines that they can take by pill daily or, um, injections that can be once every 3 months so they can have a really great, uh, quality of life and time out of the hospital. Created by
