Anytime the words chest and pain are paired, a heart attack is the first thing that pops into most minds. But your chest pain is something different — it comes and goes with activity, for example — and it’s become a regular occurrence.
Ongoing chest pain like this is often due to angina, a condition in which your heart muscle isn’t getting enough oxygen. Angina affects about 10 million Americans and might stem from any number of issues, including heart disease. The problem, however, might not be related to your heart, at all.
To shed some light on chest pain that comes and goes, the team at Advanced Cardiovascular Specialists takes a quick dive into some of the possible causes of this common issue.
Of the millions of Americans who have angina, stable angina is the most common. As we mentioned, angina occurs when your heart muscle isn’t getting enough blood, and this is commonly due to coronary artery disease (CAD), which affects about 5% of adults aged 20 and older in the United States.
With stable angina, your chest pain is fairly predictable — it occurs regularly, for the same amount of time, and it's usually tied to something specific, such as exercise.
If you have a disease like CAD, which slows the delivery of oxygenated blood to your heart, this issue can become more pronounced during exercise, when the demand for oxygen rises. When this happens, you can experience chest pain, as well as:
These symptoms tend to go away once you stop and rest, and they can also be relieved with nitroglycerin medications.
Your heart is far from the only organ in your chest cavity, which also houses your lungs and your upper digestive tract. As a result, your ongoing chest pain might be tied to one of these areas of your health.
As well, your chest pain could be due to musculoskeletal issues like myofascial pain in your pectoral muscles. This pain is often sharper, and you can pinpoint it more easily and may even hurt when you press on the area.
Chest pain can also be among the many symptoms of a panic attack, which closely mimics a heart attack. Approximately 11% of Americans experience a panic attack each year, and 2% to 3% of the population deals with ongoing panic attacks. What this means is that millions of people are running into chest pain as a result of anxiety and stress.
The most important takeaway that we want to leave with you is that determining what’s behind your chest pain is incredibly important.
From our standpoint, we can perform a comprehensive workup on your cardiovascular health to figure out whether your chest pain might be signaling an issue in this area. And if it is, we can take early action to safeguard your heart and reduce your risks for more serious heart disease.
Even if we don’t find anything wrong, our evaluation narrows your field of possibilities and gets you one step closer to figuring out what is going on.
For answers for chest pain that comes and goes, please contact our office in Mountain View, California, to schedule an appointment with one of our heart health experts today.
