What are the difference between Cardiac Arrest, Heart Failure and Heart Attack

I am Dr. Nishith Chandra, Director, Interventional Cardiologist at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, New Delhi, India. I am at this institute from last 22 years. Today I will discuss about the differences between cardiac arrest, heart failure and heart attack. Are these heart failure, heart attack, heart and cardiac arrest, they are same thing?  No they are not the same thing. They denote totally different meanings. So what do you we mean by heart failure.

Heart failure means that heart is failing in its duty to pump enough blood. Heart is still beating, heart has not stopped, heart is beating. Then how do a person recognize heart failure. The most common symptom of heart failure is breathlessness, intense weakness and sometimes just spin. So this is heart failure. Heart does not stop during heart failure. Heart continues to beat but weak beating inefficiently.

Then the second term comes which is heart attack. What is heart attack? Heart attack is when the there is a blockage of one of the three arteries of the coronary arteries of the heart, then the person gets a heart attack and this is recognized by severe chest pain, severe excruciating chest pain which may or may not be complete with sweating, breathlessness, intense weakness or sense feeling of impending doom. So this is called heart attack. This is different from heart failure.

What is cardiac arrest? Cardiac arrest means when the heart suddenly stops. In both heart failure and heart attack, the heart continues to beat, but only in cardiac arrest the heart count stop suddenly. So this is the most dangerous of the all three situations so when the cardiac arrest occurs the person loses its consciousness because there is no blood supply to the brain and we have to resistant the person immediately.

What you can do at that time if you find somebody collapsing? Immediately start CPR, what we call cardio pulmonary resuscitation. For learning CPR you may contact us at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute or you can join your consult your nearest heart hospital. So if you learn, if you have learned CPR then you can revive the patient from cardiac arrest.

So now you have learned that these three terms cardiac arrest is different, cardiac heart failure is different and heart attack are different and these should be treated separately.

So if you need to consult me you can consult me either through www.lybrate.com or you can meet me personally at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute, New Delhi which is there in Okhla or at my personal clinic at sector 93 A, Expressway Noida.