Bendopnea is a recently reported novel symptom in patients with heart failure (HF) defined as shortness of breath when bending forward.
It has been demonstrated that bendopnea is associated with advanced symptoms and worse outcomes.
Patients with heart failure often experience this when bending over to tie a shoe, putting socks on, or other activities requiring bending downwards.
It has been defined as occurring within 30 seconds of bending over, but could occur in as few as 8 seconds in severe cases.
When a patient is in heart failure, it often means the ventricular filling pressures are high at baseline, and bending causes a further increase in ventricular filling pressures that causes dyspnea, especially in patients with lower cardiac indices.
Bendopnea is present 33.9% of the pulmonary arterial hypertension patients.
The mean age is higher in the patients with bendopnea than in those without bendopnea, but the difference is not significant.
Bendopnea is associated with worse functional capacity status, hemodynamic characteristics and RV function in outpatient PAH patients.