Succeeding in Heart Failure, Incrementally

Heart failure (HF), like cancer, is a major killer--in the US alone, 5.2 million people die from it; another 550,000 are diagnosed with it each year. Younger patients can expect to die within five years of diagnosis; elderly within one.

But like cancer, HF is more a convenient description of a set of diseases and conditions than it is itself a disease. The American College of Cardiology and the American...