(New Old Age Blog – New York Times) – For more than six months, Harriett Cooke had been uncommonly tired, panting when she walked her sixth grade science class to the cafeteria and struggling to keep her eyes open when she drove home at night.
One day, during a class trip outside the school, she just couldn’t go on. “I sat there on the side, I put my head down on the table, and I knew I shouldn’t be feeling like this,” said Ms. Cooke, 67, who lives in Durham, N.C.
Making excuses, she left and stopped at her doctor’s office, where staff ordered an electrocardiogram (EKG). The test showed that Ms. Cooke had suffered a so-called “silent heart attack” at some indeterminate point, perhaps months earlier.
Few people know about this type of heart attack, characterized by a lack of recognizable symptoms. Yet silent heart attacks are even more common in older adults than heart attacks that immediately come to the attention of doctors and patients, according to a recent study in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
What’s more, they’re equally deadly.
The research underscores the importance of paying attention to lingering, hard-to-pin-down symptoms in older adults, experts say. Many elderly men and women tend to dismiss these; caregivers shouldn’t let that happen.
The JAMA report is based on data from 936 men and women ages 67 to 93 from Iceland who agreed to undergo EKGs and magnetic resonance imaging exams to detect whether heart attacks had occurred. EKGs assess the heart’s electrical activity, while M.R.I.’s look at its mechanical pumping activity.
So-called “recognized” heart attacks were identified when signs of heart damage were evident, and the patient’s medical record indicated that medical attention had been sought and a diagnosis rendered. “Silent” heart attacks were also signified by heart damage, but in those cases evidence from medical records was lacking.
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Interesting article. Good to know, at the same time: ‘Great. Now we, especially the older generation, have something else to be concerned about’.
Coming from an engineering background I would want to know the following:
Did Harriett Cooke have any other medical condition that may have contributed to the silent heart attack?
Was she overweight? What is her blood chemistry like?
What is the definition of ‘more common in older adults’? How ‘common’? At what age?
The number of people in the research is very small indeed and may not be representative of the wider community.
Sometimes I wonder whether we are being bombarded with too much medical information. Does fear of an adverse medical event contribute to unnecessary anxiety and could it actually make people sick? Lets be aware, but not get paranoid about such events, especially when people do not have too many ‘risk’ factors.
Figures are scary. When you reach the age of 93, as awful as it is, death of any cause approaches 100%.