Many heart attacks not recognised, says study

Press, 5 November 1984, Page 22

Many heart attacks not recognised, says study

NZPA-AP Boston About 30 per cent of all heart attack victims do not realise they have suffered one, but these quiet seizures are just as likely as painful ones to foreshadow serious health problems, a new study concludes. “I think we finally convinced physicians some years ago that an actual heart attack could escape detection,” said Dr William Kannel of the Boston University School of Medicine. “We now have evidence that it’s even more common than we originally thought it to

be.” Results of the long-run-ning Framingham heart study, analysed by Dr Kannel and Dr Robert Abbott, showed that more than a quarter of heart attacks in men participants and about a third in women participants were not recognised when they occurred. The seizures showed up later on routine eletrocardiogram tests. About half of the victims could not remember suffering pain at all. The rest had been diagnosed by their own doctors as having ulcers, gallstones,

hiatus hernia or other noncardiac problem, but at least some of those symptoms might have been caused by heart attacks. The report, published in the “New England Journal of Medicine,” said the outlook for many of these survivors was “rather bleak”. After 10 years, 45 per cent of the patients with unrecognised heart attacks were dead, compared with 39 per cent of those whose attacks were diagnosed and treated at the time.