Sanders suffered a heart attack

Bernie Sanders suffered a heart attack this week when he was hospitalized in Las Vegas for chest pains, his presidential campaign disclosed Friday as the Vermont senator was discharged from the hospital.

Sanders, 78, waved as he walked out of Desert Springs Hospital Medical Center on Friday afternoon, where doctors had placed two stents into his heart to correct a blocked coronary artery, according to his campaign. He plans to participate in the Oct. 15 Democratic debate in Ohio, but it’s not clear how soon he will resume campaigning.

“I want to thank the doctors, nurses and staff at the Desert Springs Hospital Medical Center for the excellent care that they provided,” Sanders said in a statement. “After two and a half days in the hospital, I feel great, and after taking a short time off, I look forward to getting back to work.”

Sanders’ campaign had previously disclosed that he had been treated for a blocked artery — a relatively common and low-risk procedure — after seeking medical attention for chest pains on Tuesday night in Las Vegas.

Roy Behr, a Democratic strategist who is unaffiliated with any presidential candidate in the race, said the additional detail that Sanders had suffered a heart attack is “clearly not helpful to his campaign.”

But Behr added that health concerns tended to be more politically harmful when they were “cumulative” — building a narrative about the candidate that can be hard to reverse.

On Friday, the campaign released a statement from Sanders’ doctors revealing that Sanders was also diagnosed with suffering a myocardial infarction, another term for a heart attack, which describes when the heart suffers from a lack of oxygen due to a blocked artery or slow blood flow.

The campaign did not say why it had not released details about the heart attack sooner.

Heart attacks can be deadly, but survival rates and treatments have improved in recent decades.

Patients are usually put on medication including aspirin and urged to rest while the body recovers, said Helga Van Herle, associate professor of medicine in cardiology at the Keck School of Medicine at USC. “Those are all good signs,” she said.

Van Herle said it was common for heart attack sufferers to return to work in good health.