Heart Disease Symptoms
Recognizing heart disease symptoms can not only save your life, but can also help you save the lives of others. Being informed is the best heart disease prevention method. While chest pain and pressure are the best-known symptoms of a heart attack, there are several other warning signs. These include:
- Pain and/or a sense of squeezing or fullness in the chest
- Difficulty breathing, shortness of breath
- Profuse sweating
- Pain in the upper back
- Indigestion and/or heartburn
- Arm pain in either arm but more commonly in your left arm
- General feeling of fatigue
- Toothache, jaw pain and/or headache
Frighteningly, about one fourth of heart attack victims experience no warning sign at all. A heart attack without discernable symptoms is called a silent heart attach. Patients with diabetes mellitus are at an increased risk of having silent heart attacks. Work with your doctor to monitor you heart’s function on an as-prescribed basis, particularly if you have an existing heart condition, are at an increased risk or know that your family has a history of heart disease.
For those heart attack victims that do are given a warning, symptoms can range from mild to severe depending on the individual case. Mild symptoms do not necessarily indicate mild danger. A heart attack with mild symptoms or no symptoms at all can be just as dangerous, or maybe even more dangerous, than one with severe symptoms. Mild heart attacks can and do prove deadly for some sufferers.
It is crucial to seek immediate medical attention if you even suspect that you are having a heart attack. The longer a person waits, the more heart muscle death occurs—sometimes resulting in permanent arrhythmias, or irregular heartbeats—in the event that the person makes it to the hospital in time to save his or her life.
Diagnosing Heart Disease Symptoms
If a patient shows up at the emergency room complaining of severe chest pain, the doctor will perform diagnostic tests including an electrocardiogram (ECG). An ECG tracks the electrical activity of a person’s heart and looks for abnormalities indicative of a heart attack. An ECG can even pinpoint the location of heart muscle that is deprived of oxygen (due to blockage of blood-rich oxygen to the heart). This diagnostic test also serves to identify areas of the heart muscle that have already died off.
If the ECG does not provide the doctor with a definitive heart attack diagnosis, the patient will have to undergo blood tests that look for elevated cardiac enzymes. Cardiac enzymes are proteins that dying heart muscles emit into the bloodstream. Cardiac enzymes that are released into the blood as a result of heart attack and heart muscle death include troponin, creatine phosphokinase (CPK) and a certain sub-fraction of creatine phosphokinase, called the MB subfraction. The blood test process can delay diagnosis for twenty-four hours as a series of blood tests are taken and cardiac enzyme levels are measured over time to gauge whether they are consistent with the increasing amount of heart tissue that has died.