Heart Attack: Symptoms, Causes, Treatment and Prevention
Recent studies show that the number of people losing their lives because of heart attack has been increasing in recent years. What is it that’s leading to such a hike? Are people becoming careless towards their health and diet? What are the chances of a person facing a heart attack? There may be several such questions in your mind and here’s all that you need to know. Heart Attack symptoms would be further discussed in this article.
What is a heart attack? Basically, when a segment of the heart muscle dies due to loss of blood supply, it is said to be a heart attack. Such blockage of blood supply usually happens when an artery that supplies the heart muscle gets blocked by a blood clot. This is the biological reason for the occurrence of a heart attack. Now, this may happen owing to various reasons, and such causes are mentioned later in the article.
Symptoms of Heart Attack
Heart attack is very sudden and usually gives no time to the person to look after the symptoms. However, when you need to know if it’s heart attack, here are the symptoms:
- Crushing chest pain
- Feeling of tightness, pressure, pain and squeezing in the chest
- Shortness of breath
- Restlessness and dizziness
- Face seems grey in color
- A terror feeling that life is about to end
Warning signs: As mentioned earlier, heart attack is sudden. However, it has some warning signs. They are sudden shortness of breath, discomfort and pain in the arms, neck, stomach and back.
Causes of Heart Attack
After knowing the biological reason behind heart attack, you need to be aware of other causes as well. Here are some of the popular risk factors of heart attack.
- Age
- High blood pressure
- High triglyceride level or high cholesterol
- Tobacco
- Illicit drug use
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Metabolic Syndrome
- Stress
- Lack of physical activity
These are the basic causes of heart attack and also the habits and health conditions that you need to avoid strictly.
Heart Attack Treatment
Heart attack treatment has to be done as quick as possible. The quicker you are, the higher the chances of success. Now, before you head to the hospital for heart attack treatment and run out of time, here’s what you should actually do when you see a person having a heart attack. This is the heart attack first aid, you can say.
Heart Attack First Aid:
- Make the person sit on a chair and ask him to rest and calm down and you too, keep calm.
- Loosen the tight clothing of the person, if any.
- Simply ask the person if they take any heart medication like nitroglycerin. If yes, help them take it.
- Meanwhile, call for emergency help without waiting for the medicine to work.
- Perform CPR if the person is unresponsive and unconscious.
Heart Attack Prevention
As we say, prevention is better than cure. So how to prevent heart attack? Below mentioned are some points to help you out:
- Make your diet very healthy. Include plenty of veggies, fruits and Grains in your diet.
- Quit smoking. In fact, you need to quit every addiction you have. Stop using drugs, quit alcohol and eliminate tobacco from your life completely.
- Stay stress-free. It can be done by any relaxation method like meditation, yoga, some “me” time or anything that helps you relax.
- Find ways to be active. Make sure you’re involved in any kind of physical activity which can be as simple as walking or jogging.
- Work towards keeping your blood pressure at a healthy level. Hike in blood pressure level can contribute to a heart attack.
These are simple lifestyle changes that can make your heart healthy and help you avoid heart attack and if not taken seriously, can lead you to another heart attack. Know what your heart needs and work in that direction. Stay healthy and stay happy!
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