People experience heart pain in different ways. Some persons describe the pain as having the quality of a pressure or weight upon the chest. It may feel as if someone were kneeling on the person’s chest or worse yet, as if an elephant were standing there. To other people the pain may have more of a quality of burning, piercing, or squeezing. Some people associate this pain with a pressure or feeling of distention, as if gas had built up around the heart. The pain might be temporarily relieved by belching but it always returns. Over a period of minutes or hours the pain may vary in intensity, but it has a persistent, agonizing quality.Most people have not previously experienced such distress. This is usually a new and frightening experience. An afflicted person may feel weak and faint as he tries to stand or walk. Some will try to get relief by lying down, others by rolling around on their beds. There may or may not be a sense of suffocation accompanying the pain. If there is, the person feeling it is likely to sit up, pant for breath, loosen his collar or even walk to a window and throw it open in an attempt to get more air into his lungs.It should be obvious to people in this predicament that something is drastically wrong. The condition is so different from indigestion and so painful that it should be clear at once that medical attention is urgently needed.At least half of the deaths caused by a heart attack occur within the first few hours because by this time the heart has undergone an extreme injury. A damaged heart may not be able to beat properly. It may not be able to pump blood to the brain and other vital organs, and a complete state of cardiac collapse can occur within a matter of seconds or minutes. The greatest chance for survival under these circumstances is to seek immediate medical attention, preferably, in a hospital. An examination by a doctor and an electrocardiogram (ECG) can frequently establish a diagnosis within a matter of minutes. If the pain is coming from an ailment in the abdomen instead of the heart, the chances are very great that medical attention would be required for pain of this severity in that location. If you are fortunate enough and no serious condition exists, at least the medical attention can relieve your pain, so you are still better off than if you had struggled through the problem by yourself at home.Perhaps 20 percent of people who have a heart attack have minimal symptoms. Some people who have had a heart attack are never aware that something has happened. These “silent” coronaries are usually picked up in routine physical examinations by the electrocardiogram. There are certain definite signs in the ECG that are almost positive evidence of a prior heart attack. Autopsy examinations on large numbers of patients have confirmed this evidence. The probable reason for the lack of symptoms is that a blood vessel in the heart closed off gradually over a period of weeks or months rather than suddenly over a period of minutes or hours.*3/309/5*
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