Can You Have a Minor Heart Attack and Not Know

Can you accept a heart attack and not realise it?

Nosotros might think that the effects of a heart attack would be so dramatic they would be impossible to ignore. That's not always the example.

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The archetype description of the sensation of a center attack is that it's like a heavy weight crushing your chest accompanied by a feeling of overwhelming anxiety. In films people clutch their chests, show panic in their optics and then fall to the floor. And it can happen only like that. But not always.

Heart attacks occur when the supply of blood to the heart becomes blocked, usually past a claret clot. Despite what's happening in the body, sometime people feel no chest pain at all, which ways they delay getting help. Fifty-fifty with mild breast pain, many assume they accept indigestion and only discover later that they've had a heart attack after an electrocardiogram in hospital shows damage to the heart. Sometimes this is known every bit a silent heart attack. A study published in 2016 found this could happen in as many as 45% of heart attacks.

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The information for this research started existence collected in the late 1990s and since and so the diagnosis of heart attacks has improved, and then the figure would probably not be equally high today, simply every year there are however some people who, at the time, had no thought they were having a heart attack.

In that location are also patients who knew that they were ill, just not why. They experience pain in the jaw, cervix, arms, stomach or back and experience short of breath, weak or light-headed. They might sweat or vomit. It's the combination of symptoms rather than the severity of chest pain that allows for a diagnosis.

Men are more likely to accept chest pain when they take a heart assault (Credit: Alamy)

It is oftentimes said that these heart attacks without chest pain are more common in women, leading women to delay getting help and reducing their chances of survival. In order to plant whether this really is the instance, researchers in Canada in 2009 set out to mensurate the symptoms of a heart assault systematically, by studying 305 patients undergoing angioplasty. This is where a blocked blood vessel is re-opened by inflating a small balloon inside information technology. The procedure tin briefly mimic the symptoms of a heart attack, then while the balloons were inflated patients were asked to describe what they could experience. They institute no differences between men and women in terms of breast discomfort, arm hurting, shortness of breath, sweating or nausea, but women were more than likely to have hurting in the neck and jaw in add-on to breast pain.

The findings of other studies have been inconsistent, sometimes finding that men and women are every bit likely to feel chest pain, others that it'due south more mutual in men. Sometimes the effect is dislocated by researchers including other diagnoses aslope heart attacks in the same study. So in 2011 a review was conducted, with the sole aim of establishing whether at that place is a difference in the symptoms experienced by men and women.

Studies from the US, Japan, Sweden and Germany, United kingdom and Canada were all included, the largest involving more 900,000 people. The data was taken from the best 26 of these studies, combined and re-analysed. They concluded that women are less likely than men to present with chest pain and more likely than men to take symptoms such every bit fatigue, nausea, dizziness or fainting and pain in their neck, jaw or arms. With both sexes, the bulk yet experienced chest pain, but a third of women and almost a quarter of men had heart attacks without having whatever symptoms in their breast, making information technology difficult for them to realise what's happening to them.

Some center attacks have none of the symptoms nosotros might recognise form the movies (Credit: Alamy)

If you don't know how serious your symptoms are, naturally you're less probable to go for assist. People expect on boilerplate between two and five hours.

A new study has sought to find almost more than about people'due south thought processes in making what can be a life-and-death determination to go to a doctor. In-depth interviews with a minor number of women who'd had middle attacks revealed that half knew something was wrong and immediately went for assistance. Three had vague symptoms which began as balmy, merely and so got more than intense, prompting them to the dr.. Only the remaining people had no thought their symptoms were to do with their eye and didn't tell anyone else, deciding to wait and see.

So the lesson is that a burdensome breast pain is very serious and could indicate a eye set on, but so could a collection of other symptoms, therefore nosotros need to consider the possibility of a middle set on even when information technology doesn't seem quite similar in the films.

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Source: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20170912-can-you-have-a-heart-attack-and-not-realise-it

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