Silent Heart Attack: 6 Things You Should Know About Myocardial Infarctions Without Apparent Symptoms

Hearts attacks occur as a consequence of coronary artery disease, but they don’t always come with any warning signs to let people know they are on the verge of having one. It is not unlikely for a person to suffer from a heart attack without even being aware of it. When this occurs, it means that the person is having a silent heart attack.

1. Silent attacks are often confused with something else

A heart attack with symptoms usually manifests itself through chest pain, shortness of breath, cold sweat, anxiety, fear, nausea, and vomiting. However, a silent heart attack doesn’t give you any signs.

Some of the reasons why people don’t really know they are having a silent heart attack include:

• Certain people have a very high pain tolerance, so the chest pain that’s usually a sign of a heart attack often goes by unnoticed. Generally speaking, angina is the most common symptom that people who are having a heart attack notice, because the pain is severe and obvious. But when you have a high pain resistance, you might not notice that your chest is actually hurting.
• Two of the risk factors for silent heart attacks are age and gender. People above the age of 75 are more likely to experience a silent heart attack, while men are more likely to have one compared to women.
• Even if angina is the most common heart attack symptom, people who have a silent heart attack might actually have other symptoms that don’t make them suspicious. For example, if you aren’t diagnosed with a heart condition, but suddenly started having difficulty breathing (dyspnea is one of the symptoms for heart attack), would you even suspect that you’re having a silent heart attack? It just so happens that some people don’t know they’re having a heart attack because what they are experiencing is rather atypical, and not something they would normally associate with this condition.
• In some cases, people with other medical problems can have their pain impulse nerves affected, which means that potential chest pain as a sign of a heart attack might go by unnoticed. This is more likely to occur in people who have chronic kidney disease or diabetes.

2. The damage may be irreversible

Unlike a normal heart attack, which produces visible symptoms, a silent one can occur without you knowing it. That means that diagnosis generally occurs after the damage is done. The consequences of a silent heart attack usually show up in a future EKG, so that’s when the doctor will know that you’ve had one.

If the doctor performs an EKG and suspects you’ve had a heart attack, they may also ask you to take an echocardiogram, which will show them if there are any weak portions of the heart muscle. Another test that can be performed is the Cardiolyte scan, which shows if there are any parts of the heart’s muscles that don’t receive the required amount of blood supply.

3. A silent heart attack says two important things about your heart

Also, because you’re not showing any symptoms, it’s problematic for doctors to measure the severity of your coronary artery disease, or if your body is properly responding to the treatment. For example, since you’re not showing any signs of chest pain, it will also be difficult to tell if your coronary artery disease is stable.

4. Silent and regular heart attacks are treated the same

Both survivors of regular and silent heart attacks usually follow the same course of treatment, because the end goal is the same. to prevent it from occurring. Generally speaking, treatment should focus on:

• Providing the patient with the right medication to hold the main causes of the heart attack under control (blood pressure medication, cholesterol-lowering meds, diabetes treatment, etc.).
• Interventions that can either open a narrow coronary artery (which may include a permanent stent placement) or redirect blood away from the coronary artery blockage site (coronary bypass surgery).
• Preventing any potential future cardiac arrhythmias that could lead to death.

5. Stress tests are recommended for those with silent heart attacks

Stress tests are almost 100 percent reliable when it comes to diagnosing a regular heart attack, but they are even more important in determining the current status of someone who has had a silent heart attack.

There are two things that this stress test manages to achieve:

• To pinpoint the exact effort threshold that can cause a heart attack for every particular individual. This means that doctors become more informed on just how much effort your heart can take before you’re at risk of another heart attack.
• During a stress test, ischemia is bound to show some signs even for those who have had a silent heart attack. It might not be angina, but they do feel something, and under medical supervision, you’re more likely to discover more about your problem. What this basically means is that doctors will be able to identify how silent heart attacks manifest in your particular case (like maybe one of your legs starts feeling numb).

6. A silent heart attack is worse than a normal one

Conclusion

With or without symptoms, any heart attack has the potential to kill a person. That means that they should all be treated with the same amount of importance, particularly since, once you’ve had a heart attack, you’re very likely to have another one. So, symptoms or not, don’t forget to get your heart checked whenever the doctor recommends it.