Heart Attack
The heart attack (medical term: myocardial infarction) is a life-threatening occurrence caused by a sudden, complete blockage of a coronary vessel. Fast action is decisive in the case of an acute heart attack. If one of the three large coronary vessels (coronary arteries) is blocked, part of the heart muscle will no longer be supplied with oxygen and nutrients. If the blocked vessel is not opened again within a few hours, the muscle tissue that can no longer be supplied by the blood dies. The tissue affected is designated as infarction. The bigger the blocked vessel, the bigger the infarction.
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The risk of sudden heart death is especially high in the case of an acute heart attack due to severe cardiac dysrhythmia (ventricular fibrillation). A large infarction can also impair the pumping of the heart so strongly that the circulation more or less collapses. One speaks here of a cardiogenic state of shock. For this reason, even if a heart attack is only suspected, no time should be lost and the emergency doctor should be sent for at once!!
Every year some 300,000 people in Germany suffer a heart attack – and almost one in two of these dies before reaching the hospital. The heart attack is therefore by far the leading cause of death, the death rate for women being higher than for men. While it is true that young and middle-aged women are fairly safe from heart attack due to oestrogen (the female sexual hormone), the infarction rate also increases by them after the menopause. And since women also tend to have more uncharacteristic infarction symptoms, such as gripping pains in the bowels, nausea and vomiting, the complaints are often understood too late, the risk of death increasing accordingly.
Many infarctions occur in the early hours of the morning. One possible explanation for this is that, with the start of the day, the blood levels of various hormones affecting the circulation increase, increasing the blood pressure and heart rate accordingly.
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