The Role of Norepinephrine in Heart Failure

"I've always been a fan of starting with norepinephrine to see if the poor heart function is simply due to inadequate coronary perfusion," he says. "What can happen is this awful cycle of cranking up the SVR, systemic vascular resistance at expense of the cardiac output." He adds that sometimes we receive patients in the ICU who are on a rocket fuel of norepine dopamine and maybe what probably would have fixed things was to keep the norepine cortisol level below 0.1.