Heart Attack Cause, Heart Attack Symptoms, Heart Attack Treatment

Heart Attack Cause

Heart attacks are caused by cholesterol blockage of the blood vessels that feed your heart. Cholesterol is a fatty substance present in many junk foods to give them a rich flavor. The medical term for heart attack is myocardial infarction. It means death of heart muscle.

Your heart is a muscular bag that pumps blood around your body from the tip of your nose to the tips of your toes. Without the heart, blood would not be able to reach your organs and circulate to your lungs. Like all other muscles of your body, your heart needs blood to nourish it too. It gets this by tapping off some of the blood it pumps to your body through some blood vessels around itself called coronary arteries. High blood levels of cholesterol choke these vessels by depositing in them. A heart attack happens when a coronary artery reaches a critical level of blockage and the area of heart muscle it supplies can no get enough blood flow. This area of affected heart muscle suffocates causing chest pain called angina and if not relieved, dies reducing the performance of the heart as a pump.

Heart Attack Cause Risk Factors

• Male gender.
• Smoking.
• Overweight, obesity.
• High blood pressure, hypertension.
• High blood cholesterol, hyperlipidemia.
• High blood sugar, diabetes.
• Strong genetic, family history of heart attacks in family members.

Heart Attack Symptoms

Heart attack symptoms include some or all of the following:

• Mid chest crushing or squeezing pain
• Sweating
• Nausea and indigestion.
• Dizziness.
• Cold, clammy feet and hands
• Palpitations

If you are having these symptoms or see a friend or loved one in similar distress you need to get to a healthcare facility immediately.

Persons with long standing diabetes may not have any of the symptoms described above. The reason being that high blood sugar over a long period of time destroys nerves. You therefore may not feel the chest pain or have any of the other symptoms. Persons with this type of heart attack will usually be advanced in age and have problems with feeling in their feet and fingers - from nerve destruction. The most common complaint in these persons is loss of appetite, indigestion, and malaise (feeling blah).

Survival is the rule in most heart attacks. The first step in HEART ATTACK TREATMENT is to get to a hospital emergency department. From here you will be stabilized prior to transfer to an intensive care unit where you will receive oxygen, pain killers, blood pressure control and clot busting medication or vessel stents to open back the blocked blood vessels.

Initially you will be on strict bed rest. By day 2 you may be allowed to sit out from bed and by day 5 to walk around and return to work in one to two months.

To prevent heart attacks, a healthy lifestyle with exercise, a low salt, low sugar and low fat diet is the first line of defense. High blood pressure and high cholesterol control with medication can prevent heart attacks.

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