Experiencing Pain Might be an Alarming Sign For Heart Attack Survivors

Analyzing the health data of adults who had heart attacks showed that experiencing moderate or extreme pain after a year could increase their chance of dying.

Experiencing pain one year after a heart attack can highly affect long-term survival, suggests a study published in the journal Stroke. This finding highlights the need to consider pain as a risk factor for future mortality when making treatment decisions.

People who have had a heart attack often report pain about a year later. Even when the pain is not associated with heart disease, it is linked with a higher likelihood of death within the next 8 years compared to adults who did not have any post-heart attack pain.

Heart Attack
Heart attack is the death of the heart muscle due to loss of blood supply. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. Other names for heart attack include acute myocardial infarction, coronary thrombosis, and coronary ...

‘Heart attack survivors who had extreme pain were more than twice as likely to die compared to those who reported no pain.#HeartAttack #HeartDisease #ChestPain’

According to the American Heart Association, a heart attack happens about every 40 seconds in the United States. Data from 2005 to 2014 estimated the annual incidence of heart attack in the United States was 605,000 new heart attacks and 200,000 recurrent heart attacks. The average age at the first heart attack was 65.6 years for men and 72 years for women.

Pain After Heart Attack Points to Worse Long-Term Survival

Pain causes significant loss of function and may lead to disability, all of which contribute to major, global public health issues. Research indicates that pain is linked to a higher risk of cardiovascular disease and overall death ().

However, the impact of pain on death after a heart attack has not yet been examined in large studies. Thus, researchers aimed to examine various levels of pain severity one year after a heart attack as a potential risk for all‐cause mortality.

The analysis of health data for more than 18,300 adults who had a heart attack, from the Swedish quality registry called SWEDEHEART, found nearly 45% of the participants reported moderate or extreme pain one year after their heart attack.

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Adults in the study were younger than 75 years of age (average age was 62, 24.5% women) and had heart attacks between 2004 to 2013.

Data on pain from a two-month follow-up visit and a participant questionnaire completed one year after their heart attack was assessed to gauge if they had no, moderate, or extreme pain. The pain they reported was more likely to be due to other health conditions.

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The participant survey did not specifically ask about the duration of pain they experienced, although a majority reported having pain both two months after the heart attack and one year later, indicating the pain was long-lasting. The study also only included people living in Sweden, which may not apply to people living in other countries or communities ().

Those with moderate pain were 35% more likely than those with no pain to die from any cause during the study period of 8.5 years. Those who reported extreme pain were more than twice as likely to die during the 8.5 study period, compared to heart attack survivors who had no pain.

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65% of the participants experiencing pain at the two-month follow-up were also experiencing pain at their 12-month follow-up, indicating persistent and long-term pain.

After a heart attack, it is important to assess and recognize pain as an important risk factor for future mortality (). In addition, severe pain may be a potential obstacle to rehabilitation and participation in important heart-protective activities such as regular exercise; reduced or lack of physical activity, in turn, increases risk.

For patients with pain, it is of particular importance to reduce other risk factors, such as smoking, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol levels.

References:

Mortality and morbidity trends after the first year in survivors of acute myocardial infarction: a systematic review - (https://bmccardiovascdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12872-017-0482-9)
Co-occurrence of Chronic Musculoskeletal Pain and Cardiovascular Diseases: A Systematic Review with Meta-analysis - (https://academic.oup.com/painmedicine/article/21/6/1106/5582704)
Mortality among persons experiencing musculoskeletal pain: a prospective study among Danish men and women - (https://bmcmusculoskeletdisord.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12891-020-03620-8)

Source-Eurekalert