The silent heart attacks we don’t even notice hit 20,000 a year

AT LEAST 20,000 Britons a year are suffering from ‘silent’ but potentially deadly heart attacks, experts warn.

They are particularly dangerous for women, who repeatedly confuse them with indigestion, a pulled muscle or the flu.

American researchers have found that silent heart attacks are almost as common as the standard attacks that prompt hundreds of thousands of hospital admissions a year.

The team from North Carolina also discovered that women who suffer a silent attack are 50 per cent more likely to die within a decade, while in men the risk increases by a quarter.

They occur when the blood flow to the heart is temporarily blocked – as with a normal attack – causing potentially fatal damage and scarring.

But many patients either have no symp-cases toms at all or wrongly assume their symptoms are caused by less serious conditions.

Most never go to hospital or see their GP, so are not offered vital medication or surgery which can prevent a fatal attack later. The researchers and other experts say the public must be made more aware of silent heart attacks amid concern many are going unnoticed. Heart disease is by far the biggest killer in the UK claiming 74,000 lives a year and leading to 188,000 hospital admissions.

But experts believe many of these deaths occur in patients who have previously suffered a heart attack without realising it.

Dr Zhu-Ming Zhang and her fellow researchers from the Wake Forest School of Medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, looked at the records of 9,498 middle-aged men and women.

Over a ten-year period some 7.4 per cent suffered a heart attack, and in 45 per cent of they were silent heart attacks.

The researchers were able to identify these attacks despite the lack of symptoms by looking at damage caused to the heart in scans.

They also found that women who suffered a silent heart attack were 58 per cent more likely to die within a decade and men 23 per cent.

Dr Zhang said her study had shown that silent heart attacks, or silent myocardial infarctions (SMIs), ‘were as common’ as ordinary heart attacks’. She added: ‘Given that SMI is characterised by no or mild symptoms, those patients are deprived of medical treatments that could prevent subsequent adverse outcomes, including a second [heart attack] or even death.’

Conservative estimates by the British Heart Foundation show that at least 20,000 Britons suffer a silent heart attack a year, although the true number may be far higher.

Around 83,000 men and women have a heart attack in Britain a year and the charity estimated a further 25 per cent may suffer a silent attack.

Professor Jeremy Pearson, Associate Medical Director at the British Heart Foundation, said: ‘This study emphasises that individuals who have ECG scan results which suggest a heart attack, but who don’t have any classical symptoms, should be investigated more fully to determine their need for future treatment.

‘Since the patients in this research were studied, heart attack diagnosis has improved significantly with more people being correctly diagnosed as suffering from a heart attack than ever before.

He added that screening for cardiac risks has increased substantially since the 1990s.

‘Deprived of treatment’