[Acute heart failure].

Acute heart failure is a life-threatening medical emergency and appropriate management can reduce the morbidity and mortality of heart failure. Despite advances in treatments, the number of deaths has increased steadily. Therefore, the guideline was assigned to convey to the physicians the virtue of medical management with recent trends in pharmacological and nonpharmacological treatments. Japanese new guidelines for the management of acute heart failure have been published from the Japanese Circulation Society in October, 2000, which was partially based on ACC/AHA guideline in 1995 but prepared under consideration of medical benefits system and health care system in Japan. We expect that the guideline would be revised to make it more useful with continual advances in the management strategies in the future.