How to Determine the Difference Between Angina and a Heart Attack

By Christopher Ruane

Many people with chest pain fear a heart attack. However, there can be many possible causes of chest pain. Some are mildly inconvenient, while others are serious, even life-threatening. Any organ or tissue in your chest can be the source of pain, including your heart, lungs, oesophagus, muscles, ribs, tendons, or nerves

Suddenly there are lots of questions to be answered:

• What happens now, • Can it be treated, • Does it require an operation, • Will I be able to continue working - or am I on my way to becoming a permanent invalid?

Your family will have their questions and anxieties too. Like you, they want to understand what is happening to you and to be reassured everything will be all right. Joining your local hospital's cardiac rehabilitation programme will help.

You will discover other people experiencing the same anxieties and worries. (Because it does help to discover other people are in the same boat!)

To look at it simply, the heart is just a mechanical pump, made up of very powerful muscles. Its job is to pumps blood around your body constantly every day of your life. Like any muscle in your body, it requires its own blood supply which brings it oxygen and nutrients to keep it alive, and able to do its job.

This blood supply travels to the heart muscle by way of small coronary arteries. These are normally able to respond to varying demands which the heart muscle makes by dilating (opening wider) or constricting (narrowing). When the heart speeds up, it requires more energy to do the extra work; so the coronary arteries dilate and deliver more oxygen to the heart muscles.

As the heart returns to its resting mode, less oxygen is required and the coronary arteries constrict to their original size. However, things sometimes go wrong with the coronary arteries, and the outcome can be either angina or a heart attack.

Angina is a specific type of pain in the chest caused by inadequate blood flow through the blood vessels (coronary vessels) of the heart muscle (myocardium).
It is brought on by exercise or effort and eases at rest or by using medication.

The pain varies from a dull ache to a sensation often described as a tight band around the chest and it rarely lasts longer than fifteen minutes on complete rest.

The cause of angina is simple to understand. When it's at rest, the heart is quite happy pumping slowly. However, exercise, effort and exertion cause the heart to pump faster and more forcefully. The heart muscle then requires increased oxygen supply.

Usually this is freely available from the coronary arteries, which dilate on demand. But if the coronary arteries are hardened or partially blocked, then the supply of oxygen to the heart may be restricted. Cholesterol or fatty deposits generally cause these types of blockages.

A heart attack (also called a coronary thrombosis or myocardial infarction), is caused by a complete blockage of one of the coronary arteries. As a result, one part of the heart muscle is permanently deprived of oxygen. The blockage is often caused by a blood clot formed inside a coronary artery.

A clot in the coronary artery interrupts the flow of blood and oxygen to the heart muscle, leading to the death of heart cells in that area. The damaged heart muscle loses its ability to contract, and the remaining heart muscle needs to compensate for that weakened area.

During the first hour or so of the blockage, the pain can be extremely severe. It's usually felt as a crushing sensation in the centre of the chest and can also affect the arms jaw and neck. It's also often accompanied by sweating, nausea and/or breathlessness, which lasts much longer than an angina attack.

In the first few days after a heart attack, the heart can be rather irritable with an accompanying erratic heart rate. This is why continuous observation in a health care setting is vital in those first few days.

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Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Christopher_Ruane

Heartburn Angina Symptoms

By Drew F Brown

Will I die or this a case of indigestion? Though the question may sound unusual, it is all too common. Especially amongst those who suffer from heartburn angina symptoms. Chest pain, sweating, vomiting, dizziness, lightheadedness. When these suddenly come on, one may be hard pressed to sit down and think calmly: "now what do these symptoms indicate?" You're much more likely to rush yourself to the emergency room-which if it is severe may be the wisest choice.

But now having determined that you have this, how do you tell them apart? Is it heartburn or is it angina pectoris? The main difference between heartburn and angina symptoms is that, with angina pectoris a person may feel nauseous, fatigued, experience shortness of breath, sweat profusely, become lightheaded, and can feel generally weak.

With heartburn, besides the usual pain and discomfort in the chest, there can also be a sensation of food or liquid coming back up from the stomach into the throat along with a bitter or acidic taste in the mouth. These would not be present with angina.

So now that you have determined what it is that you may be suffering from, what do you do about it? First, see your doctor to be certain. A qualified medical doctor's advice should always be sought in a case of chest pains. He's the expert, so don't put your life in your own hands when your hands are untrained. Best to be sure than to guess and later be dead.

But here we are going to focus on what YOU can do to handle the condition. Now if you contact any Better Business Bureau, they will gladly tell you of all the medical conditions it is currently illegal to heal. Sad but true, they will tell you anyone who says he can cure something is a fake. (Do they want everyone to stay ill, or are they just protecting some vested interest?) So with all due respect to them (which may be very little actually) we will carefully refrain from the use of the word "cure" in the remainder of this article.

What we will talk about is improvement and alleviation of symptoms. You want to feel better and to not have the worry if the next chest pain is going to be your last. So how do we bring all his about? Well for starters, let's look at what you put in the body-if it's McDonald's twice daily we have a sure cure coming (sorry, I used that word "cure" again-make it a sure improvement). You see, the cause of angina is a blockage of coronary arteries ("coronary" means relating to the heart, for those of you that are not medical doctors. And a coronary artery is an artery that gives blood to the heart itself-as a muscle.) These arteries get blocked by build-ups of waste products on the inside of the artery. When there is too much built up, no blood gets to the heart itself and it starts to starve-and causes chest pains.

The blocked arteries can be handled with surgery-if you want someone cutting into your chest. Or they can be handled another way. Nutritionally. A change of diet can go a long way toward better health. And there is something else as well. A relatively new subject in the medical field: antioxidants. These are substances that remove waste products from the body. There are many of these and there are many ways to get them into the body: food such as fresh fruits and vegetables contain them, as does some meat.

The most effective of these antioxidants is one called L-glutathione. It has been called the king of antioxidants because it is the one that is found naturally in the body's cells themselves. It was even found with people who had serious heart conditions that their bodies were chronically very low in glutathione. Which means that their bodies were getting more and more toxic as they were unable to remove the waste products effectively from their systems.

One catch-you can't take glutathione directly as the body won't absorb it. Like a dry sponge that won't pick up water, you could take a glutathione supplement directly, but it would do you no good.

What your body needs is a way to increase its glutathione levels and make maximal use of all the glutathione it has. It needs a nutritional supplement that would allow the body to produce a maximum amount of glutathione thereby helping the body to detoxify itself. Clinical trials were conducted with supplements to produce one that could do this and one was finally found that did what was required.

It is called MAXGXL. Once the persons in the trails were given MAXGXL, their symptoms started to fall away as their bodies were able to detox themselves. MAXGXL allows the body to maximize its production of intracellular (within the cells) glutathione. Once in the cells it actually has two functions. First it multiplies the glutathione that is in your cells naturally, so this gets reused many times. This makes the most of what your body already has. Secondly it causes your cells to create an abundance of new glutathione. It is gives your body a super charge in the area of new glutathione. So, once it is in the cells themselves, it is able to function fully as a detoxifier. It actually functions as a super detoxification for the body. This supplement has proven effective in a nutritional approach to the handling of angina symptoms. And while this does not substitute for the attention and care of a qualified medical doctor, this is something that can be begun and carried on by you to help heal and maintain a healthy body.

Whatever you do, you do need to DO something about your condition-as it won't just go away. Go to the next page because it will be the most important message you will ever read regarding your condition- www.GXLTeam.com. You will need to put in your email address on the next page to access the video. This is not medical advice; we don't treat or cure diseases or conditions. We support the structure and function of the body so it can heal itself. Find out what you can do about your condition, and then DO something effective.

Drew Brown is a long-time health enthusiast and fitness expert. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Drew_F_Brown