In the United States, somebody suffers a heart attack every 34 seconds. Understanding what is a heart attack and what are symptoms of a heart attack often involves interpreting complicated medical descriptions. Instead, our professor helps the viewer to understand more about heart attacks by using a simple analogy. This lesson also reviews the symptoms that can occur in those people suffering a heart attack, and the importance of immediately seeking medical attention should these symptoms arise.
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What is a heart attack?
Your heart is the engine of your body. It keeps you alive by pushing blood where it’s needed. Like other engines, the heart has a line that feeds it the fuel it needs. Heart attacks happen when this fuel line gets damaged. Imagine that you are running down the street and you trip, fall, and badly scrape your knee. The knee will become painful, swollen, red, and hot. This is called “inflammation,” and it is your body’s way of repairing itself after it’s been hurt. If you care for it, it will quickly stop bleeding and the pain will soon fade away. After a while, it crusts over, and the swelling goes down.
Soon, the scab falls off, the skin looks pink, but this also gets better, and then it looks like nothing ever happened. The healing was successful. Now imagine the same example with scraping your knee, but this time, right after the crust forms and things are better, you fall and scrape it again. This time it bleeds more, and the pain is worse. The next day, you scrape it again, and then you continue to scrape it every day for many years. With time, a bulge of crust and blood would form as the knee tried to heal itself at the same time it continued to get hurt. This is a good way of understanding how heart disease happens.
What causes a heart attack?
Cigarettes and eating poorly cause heart attacks, because they scrape the inside of your heart’s fuel line. After years of scraping, blockages form inside of it. The heart cannot work without fuel, so it keeps fixing the fuel line, while you keep scraping it. Over time, these blockages grow and eventually block the line. This can result in chest pain that happens when you exercise or walk. Your chest hurts because exercises make your heart work more, but its line is blocked, and it cannot get the fuel it needs.
Heart Attack Symptoms:
Heart attack symptoms feel like pressure or burning in the center of the chest . This feeling can be mild or very strong. Together with the pain in the chest, some people can feel achy shoulders or arms, and it can even go up your neck and jaw. For some women, heart troubles can feel like they are very out of breath, even without any chest pain. If you ever feel anything like that, do not take any chances and go to the hospital.
When you are trying to lower your chances of having a heart attack, there are medications available that can help. But no matter what you do, taking away the things that hurt your heart is the most important step.
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