What is diastolic heart failure?

Diastolic heart failure is the same as heart failure with preserved ejection fraction or HFPEF. It's used to describe a condition where the heart muscle is too stiff and unable to relax as well as it should do. As a result, you get a back pressure as the blood is trying to enter the heart. A sign of this is that the left atrium which is the main feeding chamber into the left ventricle can dilate out. The symptoms that you can get with diastolic heart failure are very similar to systolic heart failure which are breathlessness, leg swelling, fatigue. There are different causes of diastolic heart failure so it's really important to try and control the ones that we can and they largely include things like having a high blood pressure that's not well controlled and has led to the heart muscle becoming thick, poor diabetes control, being overweight and not exercising enough.