No-Salt Cooking Guru

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Sodium's role in chronic heart failure

Reducing and controlling sodium consumption is a key element of the treatment regimen for heart failure.
   
“A low-sodium diet is the foundation on which we build the rest of the congestive heart failure patient’s multidrug treatment regime,” says Don Gazzaniga’s cardiologist, Michael Fowler, F.R.C.P., director of the Heart Failure Program and Cardiomyopathy Center at Stanford School of Medicine in California. The diet may help the patient:

• Feel better. If you follow a low-sodium diet daily, it can help reduce fluid retention and thus minimize the symptoms of congestive heart failure, including shortness of breath and ankle swelling.
• Decrease diuretics. “Diuretics (water pills commonly prescribed for heart failure) can’t work well if you have unrestricted sodium intake,” Fowler says. “Most of my patients who closely follow a sodium-restricted diet are able to take a lower diuretic dosage, and some are able to discontinue diuretics altogether. There is an association between lower diuretic dosage and longer survival.”
• Optimize dosage of other drugs. For example, patients often can take lower doses of other medicines (such as ACE inhibitors and beta-blockers) if they aren’t struggling with fluid retention prompted by sodium.

Heart failure patients who reduce their sodium intake should always do it under a doctor’s supervision so that their diuretic dosage can be adjusted proportionately.