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Sweating Identified as Possible Heart Attack Symptom
Some heart attacks are sudden and intensely painful but most start slowly with mild pain or discomfort that lasts just a few minutes. As a result, people often wait hours to seek help, a delay that can be fatal. Researchers reported the symptom sweating, apparently causes people to seek help more quickly.
Researchers found that people who sweat as part of their cluster of symptoms delayed the least amount of time before seeking help, while those with minimal or no sweating called for help much later. These findings were reported at the annual meeting of the American Heart Association.
Earlier studies about delays focused on one symptom, not clusters. So researchers asked the authors of 10 such studies to send their data under a recent policy from the National Institutes of Health that allows one team of researchers to use data collected by others.
Eight groups of authors in the United States and Britain cooperated. These researchers had collected their data in interviews with 1,073 patients who had experienced heart attacks. They studied 12 common symptoms: chest discomfort; shoulder, arm, or hand discomfort; neck or jaw discomfort; back discomfort; abdominal discomfort; indigestion; nausea and vomiting; shortness of breath; sweating; dizziness and lightheadedness; weakness; and fatigue.
According to the analysis, using standard statistical techniques, people with the shortest delay time, a mean of 9.78 hours, had a greater probability of experiencing the largest number of symptoms. People with the longest delay time, a mean of 22.77 hours, had a moderate probability of experiencing chest pain and shortness of breath. Sweating emerged as an important factor, researchers said.
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