, which is something you could potentially use with certain individuals to try to estimate their lifetime risk.
Let's talk about stage B; that's when that warning that the disease is giving you just got a little bit louder because it's almost ready to progress to stage C. The difference between stage A and stage B is that the patients have structural abnormalities in stage B. Now, patients don't yet have symptoms in stage B, and that's the distinction between stage B and stage C, where they end up having symptoms. Our goal as clinicians is to prevent them from ever progressing to stage C.
When it comes to managing our patients with stage B heart failure, most of the precautions I talked about in stage A also apply to stage B. On top of that, I would suggest additional precautions. You want to make sure that these patients are vaccinated. Keeping their vaccinations up-to-date can reduce their risk for incident heart disease. If they have a reduction in their ejection fraction, there are a few medications that you should be prescribing.