What does heart-related chest pain feel like?
By William R. Ladd, M.D., Director of Nuclear Cardiology, Cardiovascular Institute of the South If you suffer chest pain, particularly while exercising, you will almost certainly wonder whether it might be heart-related – and well you should. Heart muscle pain – angina – is likely to be the first warning of blocked coronary arteries, the cause of most heart attacks. While there are no infallible guidelines about whether a chest pain is heart-related, it generally takes a particular form. Heart discomfort is rarely a sharp, stabbing pain. The textbook description of angina is a feeling of heaviness, pressure, tightness or aching in the chest, usually accompanied by shortness of breath. The pain generally goes away when you stop exerting yourself, and it frequently isn’t especially severe, which is, perhaps, unfortunate. Even a heart attack may not be unbearably painful at first, permitting its victim to delay seeking treatment for as much as four to six hours after its onset. By then, t
