8.39 PM Thursday, 28 March 2024
  • City Fajr Shuruq Duhr Asr Magrib Isha
  • Dubai 04:57 06:11 12:27 15:53 18:37 19:51
28 March 2024

Chest pain not a heart attack indicator: Study

Published
By Reuters

A high degree of pain does not make it any more likely that someone coming into the emergency room with chest pains is having a heart attack, according to a study.

Researchers at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, who looked at more than 3,000 patients, also found that the most severe chest pain was not a good predictor of who was actually having a myocardial infarction, nor of which patients were more prone to having one over the next month.

The opposite was also true, said Anna Marie Chang, one of the authors of the study, which appeared in the Annals of Emergency Medicine.

"If chest pain isn't severe, that doesn't mean it's not a heart attack," she added.

Using a scale of zero to 10, with zero representing no pain and 10 being the worst pain imaginable, researchers gauged the pain levels of about 3,300 patients who arrived at the UPenn hospital emergency department complaining of chest pain.

They then followed the patients for 30 days to see who had further heart-related events.

Patients with the most severe chest pain were no more likely to be having a heart attack, or to have one within the next month, than patients with lesser pain. Pain that lasted more than an hour was also not a useful sign of a heart attack versus other conditions.

The pain of a heart attack also doesn't always settle in the chest area but may be in the chest, arm, jaw back or abdomen, doctors said.

Failures to diagnose acute myocardial infarction account for 30 percent of malpractice claims paid out, the study authors said, with 2 to 5 percent of patients who are having heart attacks being inappropriately discharged from emergency departments.

But while pain severity wasn't a good indicator of who was having a heart attack at the hospital, having arrived at the emergency department in an ambulance was.

That may be because people tend to dismiss chest pain until they are having symptoms they deem serious enough to warrant calling emergency services, said James Feldman, an emergency physician at Boston Medical Center who was not involved in the study.

"The cause of chest pain may or may not be a heart attack, but it could definitely be something serious," he added.

Women smokers have more heart risk than men

Women who smoke cigarettes are more likely to develop heart disease than men who smoke, with the risk for women increasing every year that they smoke, according to a study.

The authors, led by Rachel Huxley of the University of Minnesota, reviewed studies published between 1966 and 2010 on 2.4 million people, including 44,000 cardiac events.

They found female smokers to have a 25 per cent greater risk for coronary heart disease then male smokers -- and the difference in risk for male and female smokers increased by 2 per cent for each year they smoke.

"Prevalence of smoking is increasing in women in some populations and is a risk factor for coronary heart disease," wrote Huxley and her colleagues in The Lancet.

"Whether mechanisms underlying the sex difference in risk of coronary heart disease are biological or related to differences in smoking behaviour between men and women is unclear. Tobacco control programmes should consider women, particularly in those countries where smoking among young women is increasing."

A fifth of the world's 1.1 billion smokers are women, and an analysis released in March said millions of women in developing countries risked disease and death as their rising economic and political status leads them to smoke more.

"It hasn't been widely recognized that there had been this sex difference," Huxley said.

"For example, there are some data that indicate women will absorb more of the harmful agents in cigarettes compared to men. Women may inhale more smoke or they may smoke more intensively."

Huxley said her next step is to complete a similar study to examine if the same finding can be applied to other complications related to smoking, such as strokes.