Anaemia and chronic heart failure

Currently, one of the important clinical issues is the combination of chronic heart failure (CHF) and anaemia, which aggravates CHF course and prognosis. The main pathogenetic mechanism of anaemia development in CHF is absolute or relative erythropoietin deficit, due to pro-inflammatory cytokine effects, and renal dysfunction. The recent studies have demonstrated that correcting even moderate anaemia in CHF results in increased exercise tolerance, reduced NYHA functional class, improved quality of life, cardiac morphology and function, decreased need for diuretics, and reduced hospitalization incidence. However, there are no available data on anaemia correction effects on long-term survival, as well as on haemoglobin levels needed to start the anaemia treatment, or safe target levels of haemoglobin.