The cardiovascular diseases

THE MYOCARDIAL INFARCTION - HEART ATTACK

- Definition
- A few explanations
- The Symptoms
- How to make the diagnosis?
- Gravity diagnosis and prognosis
- The Causes
- Evolution and complications
- Medical treatment
- The Coronarography
- Treatment by angioplasty or "Stent"
- The surgical treatment
- Monitoring
- Conclusion

THE SYMPTOMS

Unfortunately, the symptoms are not always characteristic.

Typically, a myocardial infarction (heart attack) is revealed by:

Pains in the chest, simulating a weight or a bar put on the sternum, with a very variable intensity (minimal or intolerable), capable of lasting a few minutes or a few hours. Sometimes, this pain propagates into the arms, the jaw, and comes with a difficulty to breathe.

These pains can be associated to nauseas, vomiting, or even a discreet fever.

But very often, the symptoms are not that characteristic; some persons can even present a myocardial infarction without symptoms (“silent infarct”). Thus, the symptoms can be reduced to an isolated pain in the arm, or to a simple weight at the level of the chest.

From the initial stage on, it is necessary to search for the time of onset of the myocardial infarction, which corresponds, in case of successive pains, to the most prolonged time of onset.

Sometimes, the myocardial infarction is immediately massive and can then induce death, either because all heart cells die, or because of the occurrence of a lethal tachycardia.

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File last modified on july 24, 2006