While a vast majority of people will have a heart attack with traditional symptoms (chest discomfort or pain, cold sweat, extreme weakness), there is a subgroup of people, around 20 to 30 percent, who will have atypical symptoms or no symptoms at all. It is most common for women and people with diabetes to have atypical heart attack symptoms, but it can happen to anyone.
What are these unusual symptoms?
Some of the non-classic symptoms include unexplained fatigue, shortness of breath and/or discomfort in the throat, neck, jaw or a single extremity. Other patients will experience what feels like heartburn, and they will simply take medication to relieve the heartburn instead of recognizing that the pain could be coming from their heart.
Cleveland Clinic Cardiologist Curtis Rimmerman, MD, says people think a heart attack should be pain on the left side of the chest, but it is most often not a sharp pain, but rather discomfort felt in the center of the chest with a squeezing or tightness. Given the way television and movies portray a heart attack as an obvious event, it is not surprising that these less common symptoms can pass without being noticed as a heart attack.
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- August 13, 2014 9:29 pm
