Diaphragmatic Functional Electrical Stimulation in Heart Failure

Heart failure is an incapacity to provide adequate blood flow to the others organs, such as brain, liver and kidney. The patients presents weakness and fatigue of inspiratory muscles, mainly diaphragm muscle, that contributes to dyspnoea and limited physical capacity in this patients. Some methods are being studied to decrease the diaphragm weakness. The diaphragm functional eletrical stimulation is a new technique, which has been studied to improve the respiratory muscle strength. Then, the aim of this study is to assess the effects of diaphragm functional electrical stimulation (FES) on respiratory muscle strength and muscle architecture of patients with heart failure. For this the following assessments will be performed before and after stimulation: manovacuometry to verify the maximum inspiratory pressure and maximum expiratory pressure; and ultrasonography to assess muscle architecture. The subjects will be selected by the decompensation in heart failure, with the adequate elegibility criteria. This study have no control group, because this technique has been little researched and could be unethical with the patient who won't receive this treatment. The subjetcs of this research will receive the diaphragm functional electrical stimulation twice of day for consecutive five days or until the hospital discharge. Expected results at the end of the protocol with Diaphragm Functional Electrical Stimulation are: to improve respiratory muscle strength; to correlate with diaphragm muscle arquiteture.