What are Heart Disease Signs and Symptoms?
'Heart disease' is a term that refers to any number of afflictions of the most crucial of the human bodily organs. These include cardiomyopathy and cardiovascular disease as well as ischemic, hypertensive and valvular heart disorders. This disease has been known to cause a lot of havoc on people's health, many times even limiting a person's life and routine activity. In many cases, most people that are diagnosed with heart disease commonly know very little about it. While the number of symptoms of these individual heart diseases could fill enough pages for a physician's bookshelf, the end result of many of them is one or another form of heart failure, the most famous of which is the greatest killer of them all, the heart attack.
A heart attack, or myocardial infarction as it is known in medical circles, is most frequently the result of blood supply to a part of the heart getting interrupted, usually when a coronary artery has been occluded. The event to which this occlusion is most often attributed is the rupture of an atherosclerotic plaque, a collection of lipids and white blood cells unstably tethered to the wall of an artery. The result is oxygen shortage and a restriction in bloody supply (called ischemia). If left untreated for long enough (which in some cases can be no more than an hour), these two shortages can lead to the death of heart muscle tissue, and subsequently of the person reliant on the heart for blood and oxygen circulation.
There are a number of signs and symptoms that could tell you if you're about to have a heart attack, and that can also indicate other, more insidious, forms of heart disease. These include the sudden onset of chest pain, which can radiate out to the left arm or left side of the neck (this pain may also be experienced as tingling); nausea and vomiting; shortness of breath; sweating; palpitations; and even seemingly psychological symptoms, such as anxiety. About 25% of heart attacks show no symptoms at all, or at least not to be memorable enough to the person experiencing the heart attack, and are only discovered after doctors observe scarring and other damage to the heart or heart muscle.
Women experience symptoms just as men do, often reporting feelings of weakness or indigestion, as well as others. Other signs include the onset of feelings of sleepiness or fatigue. The best thing to do if you ever suspect that you may have had any of these symptoms at all would be to visit your doctor asap - do not wait, as that could prove to make it worse, possibly fatal. The reasons to fight heart disease are many. Making sure that you do everything in your power to diminish and battle any heart disease symptoms is vital to your recovery and well being. When you talk to your physician, let him or her also know exactly what is going on with you and how you would like to solve the situation.