Missed warning signs ‘may be contributing to heart attack deaths’

Missed heart attack symptoms may be contributing to a number of hospital admissions and deaths, according to new research.

A paper published by Imperial College London has examined records of all 446,744 NHS hospital stays in England between 2006 and 2010 that recorded heart attacks, as well as the hospitalisation history of all 135,950 people who died from heart attacks.

It was shown that around half of those who died from a heart attack had been hospitalised during the preceding four weeks. Of these, heart attack symptoms were not mentioned on their hospital records for one in six of them.

The report indicated that certain symptoms – such as fainting, shortness of breath and chest pain – may have been apparent up to a month before death in some patients, but doctors may not have been alert to the possibility that these signalled an upcoming fatal heart attack, due to a lack of obvious damage to the heart at the time.

Moreover, of those who were admitted to hospital for a heart attack, those whose heart attack was recorded as secondary to the main condition were two to three times more likely to die than those whose records listed heart attack as the main condition.

Lead author Dr Perviz Asaria, from the school of public health at Imperial College London, said: "Doctors are very good at treating heart attacks when they are the main cause of admission, but we don't do very well treating secondary heart attacks or at picking up subtle signs which might point to a heart attack death in the near future."

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