Heart Attack ” How is it Different From Angina?
Have you heard the terms heart attack and angina, and thought that they were interchangeable terms? This is not the case. They are both types of heart disease that result from diseased heart (coronary) arteries, but differ in what happens in those arteries. After reading this, you should be able to tell someone how heart attack and angina differ.
First, it helps to have a basic understanding of the heart before you understand what the differences are between heart attack and angina. The heart is a hollow muscular pump. It is separated by a wall, called the septum, into the right and left halves of the heart. The right side of the heart contains blood that is low in oxygen, and the left side contains oxygenated blood.
The right and left sides are further separated into two parts on each side. The tops chambers are called the atria, and the bottom chambers are called the ventricles. Blood returns from blood vessels in the body and enters the right atrium. Because it has just returned from providing the body with oxygen, when blood returns to the right atrium, it is low in oxygen. It then passes through to the right ventricle, and the right ventricle then pumps the blood to the lungs, where it becomes oxygenated. This oxygen-rich blood then returns to the heart through the left atrium, passes through to the left ventricle where it is pumped to the rest of the body and supplies your tissues and organs with oxygen.
Just like your heart supplies blood and oxygen to all your body parts, it also has to supply oxygen to itself too. The way it does this is through the coronary arteries that are found on its surface. These coronary arteries are involved when a heart attack or angina occurs.
In most cases, atherosclerosis is the main cause of heart attack and angina. Atherosclerosis is the plaque that develops on the inside of your artery walls.
Angina occurs when blood that is passing through the coronary arteries is reduced for a short period of time. This means that the appropriate amount of oxygen is not able to get to the heart during this time, but it is only temporary. Angina is not the same as heart attack. Sometimes people who have angina have had a previous heart attack, but often they have not had one at all. Angina means that your heart is not working as it should, and it is giving you a sign of this. You will notice angina come on during times of psychological or physical stress or when working in extreme temperatures.
Heart attack, on the other hand, is when blood becomes completely blocked off in one or more of the coronary arteries, and there is damage/muscle death that occurs to the heart. Heart attack is known by the medical term, (acute) myocardial infarction, or MI or AMI for short.
The thing to come away with is that angina and heart attack do differ. Heart attack results in no oxygen getting to the heart at all, whereas angina is when there is a reduced supply of oxygen getting there.