Can you tell when you’ve had a heart attack?

When Narayana Pande, 58, suddenly collapsed after experiencing shortness of breath and breaking into a sweat, his relatives dismissed it as stress and treated him to a glucose solution.

When the conditioned prevailed for more than 20 minutes, he was admitted to hospital. The relatives were shocked to know that Pande had a silent heart attack, which crawled into him without any chest pain.

If you experience shortness of breath, fainting, excessive sweating, nausea and vomitting, do not ignore it. Chances are that you might have gone through a heart attack without having the chest pain.

Typically, one of the common symptoms of a person having a heart attack is severe chest pain. Some people, however, have heart attacks without the pain.

They undergo silent heart attacks or ‘silent infarction’. These painless heart attacks, if not diagnosed or treated quickly, lead to death since it is asymptomatic.  

“If the nerve fibers of the heart are damaged for some reason, there are possibilities of occurrence of a painless heart attack,” says Dr Nagaraj Desai, a cardiologist from Wockhardt hospital. A study published in the current issue of the journal of the American College of Chest Physicians, shows that cardiac patients arriving at the hospital without chest pain have triple the death rate of other cardiac patients and are less likely to receive medications to slow the progression of a heart attack.

According to Dr KH Srinivas, professor of cardiology from the Jayadeva Institute of Cardiology, 10 percent of heart attacks happen without causing any pain.

“Diabetic patients are more prone to silent infarction. They become insensitive to pain. Those who have undergone bypass surgery and those patients with high blood pressure may also become victims of this silent killer,” he points out. 

He adds that most of the time conditions tend to be  overlooked and under-treated
at the hospital, often resulting in greater fatality rates.

“Often, when a patient arrives at hospital with atypical symptoms like the absence of chest pain, it is only after the blood test results and other diagnoses that doctors assess it as a cardiac arrest,” says Dr Desai.