It is important to recognize heart attack signs at an instant therefore it is important to know what they are so you can ensure you are reacting properly. They can be sudden and intense where no one doubts that the person is having a heart attack. The signs are clear and it is apparent for those people around them. However, if the heart attack starts slowly, there is only mild pain and discomfort leaving very little sign of a problem. This is why you should be well versed in the subtle signals.

• Chest discomfort: most heart attack signs point to discomfort in the chest area and it lasts for more than a few minutes or it goes away and returns over a period of time. This pain is described as an uncomfortable pressure, squeezing, pinching or fullness in the chest.
• Unpleasant and discomforting pains in other areas of the body. For example: the arms, back, neck, jaw or stomach may have a pain that isn’t typical for that person.
• Shortness of breath accompanying or without chest pain.
• Cold sweat, nausea or dizziness can also be present.

Heart Attack Signs

Muscles in the heart require a continual reserve of oxygen-rich blood. The coronary arteries provide the heart with this vital supply. If you have a form of heart disease, the blood can not flow as well as it should. Fatty matter, calcium, proteins and inflammatory cells build up within the arteries to form plaques of different sizes.

Her Guide to a Heart Attack: Recognizing Female Heart Attack Symptoms
By Katherine Kam
WebMD Feature
Reviewed by Michael W. Smith, MD

On a Monday morning in April, Merle Rose, a New Jersey woman, experienced what some doctors call “female heart attack symptoms;” a feeling of indigestion and extreme fatigue. Later, she had nausea, vomiting and fainting.

But she never had chest pain-a “typical” male heart attack sign. When she got to the emergency room, doctors couldn’t find any sign of heart attack and Rose says, “They would have sent me home.”

As Rose’s experience shows, many doctors-and women themselves–still don’t realize that female heart attack symptoms can look very different than those of men. In fact, according to a study of women’s early heart attack signs published in Circulation, women have more unrecognized heart attacks than men and are more likely to be, “mistakenly diagnosed and discharged from emergency departments.”

In the emergency room, physicians had assumed she had a gastrointestinal illness. But at the time, no one told Rose that she had suffered a heart attack.

When an outside cardiologist recommended by Rose’s regular doctor ordered testing that uncovered major blockages, doctors still made no mention of heart attack, she says.

So when did she finally get word? Not until several months later, when she visited a new female cardiologist. This doctor told her in retrospect that she had suffered a textbook case of undiagnosed female heart attack.

“That’s the first I ever heard,” Rose says. “This doctor told me, ‘They didn’t connect the dots.’”
Female Heart Attack Symptoms: What are They?

These chest-related heart attack signs often appear in men, and many women get them, too:

* Pressure, fullness or a squeezing pain in the center of the chest, which may spread to the neck, shoulder or jaw;
* Chest discomfort with lightheadedness, fainting, sweating, nausea or shortness of breath;

But many women don’t have chest pain. In the Circulation study on early female heart attack symptoms, researchers found that during a heart attack, 43% of the 515 women studied had no “acute chest pain… a ‘hallmark symptom in men,’” according to study authors.

Nevertheless, the study cited evidence that many emergency room doctors still look mainly for chest pain. Only a minority check for the other types of symptoms that women tend to develop. As a result, doctors may miss heart attacks in women.

“Although women can have chest tightness as a symptom of a heart attack, it’s also important for women to recognize that might not be their symptom,” says Nieca Goldberg, MD, a cardiologist and chief of Women’s Cardiac Care at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City and author of “The Women’s Healthy Heart Program.”

“Women commonly have symptoms of shortness of breath, unexplained fatigue, or pressure in the lower chest, so they easily mistake it as a stomach ailment.”

How Does High Cholesterol Contribute to Heart Attack Causes?

When your blood contains too much cholesterol, it collects on the walls of your arteries. Over a period of time, buildup can cause the arteries to harden and become narrowed. The blood flow to the heart muscle gets slowed down and eventually blocked. The blood carries oxygen to the heart and if it does not reach properly, you suffer pain and worse if it is cut off, results in a heart attack.

Heart attack symptoms you may have heard of depend on the type and intensity of your heart condition.  Patients who have had life-threatening heart problems in the past are at a dramatically higher risk for more heart related issues. One half of men and two thirds of women die from heart disease. People with these risks would greatly benefit from advanced exploration of dangerous fat deposits.

There are certian heart attack signs to look out for if you feel someone is having experiencing one. Heart attacks are the leading cause of death in the developed world. Vulnerable plaque screenings can identify the problem before a patient feels the actual heart attack signs.  The proper identification of vulnerable plaques that cause coronary artery events and heart attack signs would lead to great benefits since many potential treatments already exist.

Lipid Rich Plaque - Fibroatheroma with lipid cores, which are suspected to be vulnerable plaques, are caused by accumulations of cholesterol and other fats in the walls of arteries.  Inflammation also promotes the formation of such plaques.

How Lipid Rich Plaque relates to Heart Attack Causes: A heart attack occurs when the thin cap covering a lipid core in a fibroatheroma ruptures leading to the formation of a clot that blocks the flow of blood to the heart muscle.

InfraReDx has conducted an extensive study of the extent of fibroatheroma with lipid cores and thin caps that are contained in the coronary arteries. Such structures  occupy less than 4% of the length of the arteries, and hence there is hope that they can be found in advance and treated before they cause a coronary event.

Other Heart Attack Symptoms you should be aware of:

* Shortness of breath: If someone around you is short of breath or breathing erratically.
*Anxiety: A person becomes anxious or acts out in a way you have not seen them behaving before.
*Nausea or vomitin: With no apparent reason, a person vomits and or is nauseus

July 1, 2009  | Shelley Wood

Seattle, WA - Despite efforts to save more people suffering from in-hospital cardiac arrest, rates of survival after in-hospital CPR are no better today than they were more than a decade ago, new research suggests. The analysis, looking at records for over 433 000 patients who received CPR between 1992 and 2005, showed that the rate of survival to hospital discharge hovered at around 18% over the entire study period.

Survival rates were worse among male, nonwhite, and older patients, the researchers, led by Dr William J Ehlenbach (University of Washington, Seattle), note.

“During the time period we studied, the acute cardiac life support guidelines were updated at least two times, so both on a national level, in terms of guidelines, and within hospitals, there’s been an ongoing attempt at process improvement,” Ehlenbach told heartwire. “We thought that there might be some slight improvement over that time period, but one question we had going in was whether or not, at least theoretically, you can reach a point where the systems for delivery of in-hospital CPR can no longer be dramatically improved.”

According to Ehlenbach, it’s not totally clear whether that point has been reached, although he thinks the study findings likely reflect the fact that while CPR has probably improved, the types of patients receiving resuscitation attempts are probably sicker and less likely to be ideal candidates for CPR. “This highlights the need for improved communication between doctors and patients, particularly older patients with chronic diseases,” he said.

CPR survival rates hold steady

Researchers used fee-for-service Medicare data to identify patients age 65 years or older who had received CPR in US hospitals. They found that while the number of patients receiving CPR over the study period increased (433 985 in all), survival rates remained relatively static. CPR was more common among black patients and other nonwhite patients than among white patients, yet survival rates in the nonwhite groups were lower.

According to the authors, “some but not all” of the differences in survival between different racial groups may be explained by the hospitals where different groups receive treatment. “Black patients more often receive care at hospitals where patients of all races have lower odds of survival after CPR,” they write.

To heartwire, Ehlenbach also noted that certain diseases—hypertension and kidney disease, for example—are more common in African Americans, and response to CPR may depend in part on the kinds of underlying chronic diseases. “Another issue that we think would be interesting to know more about is whether preferences for care at end of life are different by race and whether that is playing a role here.”

Another important finding, according to the authors, was that the proportion of patients dying in the hospital after previously being resuscitated by CPR has also increased over the study period. “That was surprising to us, because over this time period there certainly was an increasing emphasis on patient education on end-of-life care and seemingly more widespread consideration of do-not-resuscitate orders,” Ehlenbach commented. The numbers may hint at the fact that patients who really are not appropriate candidates for resuscitation are still undergoing CPR efforts. “Ideally, every patient with serious chronic disease is having a conversation with their doctors about CPR and really getting to the [understanding] that there are situations in which CPR is likely to be effective and situations in which it’s much less likely to be effective.”

The authors also speculate that another reason for the lack of improvement in in-hospital survival post-CPR may be that many of the changes in CPR performance have been targeted at out-of-hospital CPR, not in-hospital. CPR by bystanders, improved emergency-response tactics, and the proliferation of automated external defibrillators are factors that “do not have analogs” in the in-hospital setting, they note.

An even bigger reason, however, is likely that older Americans are now living with multiple serious chronic diseases, such that acute illnesses that trigger cardiac arrest occur on the background of major comorbidities. “It’s possible that we are delivering better CPR, but we’re delivering it to sicker patients or patients who are less likely to survive,” Ehlenbach concluded.

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