Health encyclopaedia

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Symptoms of Heart attack

The common syptoms are:

• Crushing central chest pain. This often travels (radiates) to the neck, jaws, ears, arms and wrists. Less often, it travels to between the shoulder blades or to the abdomen.
• Breathlessness
• Clammy sweat and grey complexion! Dizziness, sickness and vomiting
• General weakness and a frightening sense of impending doom
  In the great majority of cases, people suffering a myocardial infarction may experience:
• Crushing central chest pain
• Breathlessness
• Clammy sweat and grey complexion
• Dizziness, sickness and vomiting
• A frightening sense that one is about to die
• Restlessness.

The pain often travels (radiates) from the chest to the neck, jaws, ears, arms and wrists. Less often, it travels to between the shoulder blades or to the abdomen. The pain does not pass on resting, as in Angina.

Severe pain is not always a feature. In less major cases, pain may be absent, and there is evidence that up to 20 per cent of mild heart attacks are not recognised as such, or even as significant illness, by those affected. This means that some people who, because of previous unrecognised attacks, are much more vulnerable than they or their doctors realise. Such people may be suffering progressive heart muscle damage.

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