What does heart attack mean?
Heart attack means that some of the muscle in your heart has died. The medical term for this is myocardial infarction (MI). Most commonly, a heart attack starts with a kind of heavy pressure or pain in the chest, often extending into the neck or left arm. You may have trouble catching your breath, or you may feel weak and break into a cold sweat. A heart attack usually occurs when one of the blood vessels (called coronary arteries) that bring blood to your heart muscle is blocked. This can happen when a blood clot forms in a blood vessel that is already partially blocked. The partial blockage, which develops over many years, is most often caused by too much fat layered in the wall of the blood vessel (this is often called hardening of the arteries—the medical term for this is atherosclerosis).
