Common Symptoms of Cardiovascular Disease - Dr. Kris Dosh, UP Health System - Marquette

This is an echocardiogram. It's an ultrasound of the heart. It shows us most of what we need to know about whether the valves are opening appropriately, whether there's any leakiness of the valves, if the heart pump function is strong or weak. All things that we need to know in assessing where to go next with this patient. What most people are talking about when they ask about cardiovascular symptoms, they mean heart symptoms. And so the most common symptoms that we see are one of chest pain, shortness of breath, or palpitations. A lot of the various types of problems that we deal with will have at least one of those symptoms. The most common symptom from a cardiac standpoint is probably chest pain of various types, pressure, aching, burning, some sort of chest discomfort. For the various types of peripheral work that I do, it's usually discomfort also, achiness in the calves or sometimes in the quadriceps muscles, usually with walking. Most of the symptoms that we see in the cardiovascular realm get worse with exertion. You should be aware of anything on the left side of the chest. We often run into problems with people who write off symptoms of vague chest discomfort. We'll often ask people if they're having chest pain. They say, no, I'm not having chest pain, but then they'll say a minute later, I was just having this pressure, achiness. If it's getting worse, particularly if it's occurring at rest, doesn't go away after a couple minutes, that could indicate a heart attack, can be a potentially life-threatening problem, is something that needs urgent care. There are different types of heart attacks. In a patient who has a completely blocked artery, usually they'll experience a severe pressure, aching on the left side of the chest, but symptoms can be variable depending on diabetes and other conditions that make chest pain less likely. It might include achiness in the jaw, in the neck, in the shoulder blades, in the back. The severity depends on whether an artery blocks off or it's just partially blocked. If a person has a partially blocked artery, usually there's not significant damage to the underlying heart muscle. If the artery blocks off completely, and that's usually the type of symptom a person would have, is the unrelenting chest pain that, you know, they can even pass out or they just look really sick. If they have that kind of a heart attack, then you can lose heart muscle, and if that happens, you can go into heart failure, and those are people who tend to have shorter lifespans because of a heart attack if they don't get in emergently. A person should talk to their doctor anytime they have a new symptom of chest pain. Even amongst medical professionals, it can be difficult to differentiate between normal chest pain and abnormal chest pain. It's just better to bring it to your doctor's attention if you're experiencing anything like that. Initial workup is always just sitting down and a basic history and physical and an exam. Beyond that, an EKG will be done, and then various types of non-invasive tests like an ultrasound of the heart or a stress test are usually the first studies. In certain cases, we'll have a person go straight to an invasive heart catheterization, but more often one of the non-invasive studies will be done first.