Many ignorant of heart attack signs study says Many people with heart disease do not know the symptoms of a heart attack even though their risk of suffering one is five to seven times higher than those with no such history researchers reported.
Symptoms can include nausea and pain in the jaw chest or left arm. But the research team said shorter hospital stays and a move to outpatient treatment have decreased the amount of patient education on the subject. Kathleen Dracup and colleagues at the University of California San Francisco School of Nursing said they looked at 3522 patients in the United States Australia and New Zealand who had previously suffered a heart attack or had undergone a procedure such as angioplasty for heart disease. They found that 44 percent of them scored poorly on a true-false test measuring how savvy they were about symptoms. Women in general along with patients who had taken part in cardiac rehabilitation those with higher education younger people and those who were treated by a heart specialist rather than a family doctor tended to have the best scores on the test the report said.
"In decades past such patients were frequently hospitalized and would receive education and counseling from physicians and nurses during their hospital stay" they said in the report published in the Archives of Internal Medicine. "Unfortunately structural changes in health care delivery have led to decreased lengths of hospital stay and increased use of outpatient facilities ... which in turn have had a dramatic effect on the time available for the education of patients" they added.