Detecting Silent Heart Attacks

Posted January 31st, 2010.

Heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in the United States. Some heart disease studies estimate that painless heart attacks, also known as unrecognized myocardial infarctions, affect 200,000 people in the United States each year and the numbers may be even far higher as no one has fully understood how often these heart attacks occur and what they mean, in terms of the sight and symptoms. The conventional way of detecting a recent heart attack may not apply to these silent heart attacks. So the actual number of silent heart attack cases could be higher than previously documented.