Chest Pain

Here are Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment of Chest Pain

Good evening friends, I am Dr. Bharat B. Kukreti. I am a CI consultant intervention Cardiology at Paras Hospitals, Gurgaon. Today, we will discuss heart problem manifestation, chest pain.

We all have experienced chest pain at some point in time. It is such a common syndrome that everybody has gone through it at some point. The important thing here is that chest pain may be associated with a wide variety of disease which may range from a very simple gastritis to a very lethal heart attack. So the problem with chest pain is that we can’t identify whether we are going through a heart attack or just another chest pain. So, this is what we will be discussing today.

First of all, How your chest pain occurs in a heart attack? A heart attack patient will typically about chest pain in a sensation of heaviness or squeezing or burning in the central chest or the left side of the chest which is radiating to either one arm or both arm or shoulders or jaw. It may be associated with a very profuse sweating and a sensation of restlessness, breathing difficulty or the sometimes patient may just faint. These all will be the symptoms of an ongoing heart attack.

Important thing is that these symptoms can be because of a heart attack but sometimes heart attack can occur even without the proper symptom which you can identify. Then, it becomes a difficult situation to identify how we know that it is a heart attack. So, once somebody is having a chest pain, you should first consult a doctor and get an E. C. G. done and to see whether the chest pain seems to be of heart region or something else. So, what can this something else be? This something else, that is a differential diagnosis of the chest pain may be apart from heart these other structures like lungs, they may be bone, they may be the muscular origin and the chest pain may be of neurological origin and sometimes just simple gastritis can give you a very severe chest pain also.

So, out of all these probabilities, the heart disease probability is the most dangerous. So that’s why once somebody has chest pain, it’s important to rule out the heart problem first so that life can be saved. So, if somebody is having chest pain, the first thing to be done is E. C. G. and it is to be seen by a qualified doctor to see whether the E. C. G. is suggestive of a heart problem or not. There is one interesting fact here. Up to 50% of the first E. C. G.s of the heart patients may be normal. So the first normal E. C. G. does not rule out a heart attack. Diagnosis for ruling out a heart attack is a systematic approach which includes Serial ECGs; Serial ECG means ECG now, ECG at half an hour, ECG at one hour, ECG at two hours, thus several ECGs and then afterward Cardiac Enzyme Test is done.

So, we will discuss this diagnosis and treatment part of chest pain or rather heart attack in our subsequent video, ok? You can contact me for chest pain problems or any other cardiac related problems into Paras Hospital, Gurgaon or you can contact me through Lybrate.