Many Who Have Died of Cardiac Arrest May Have Had Undetected Heart Attacks, Study Says

Not all heart attacks are the same — some of them are characterized as silent, meaning they can occur with atypical symptoms or no symptoms at all, and new research reveals a strong association between these silent heart attacks and sudden cardiac death. In other words, many people who have died of sudden cardiac arrest may have had an undiagnosed or unnoticed heart attack at some point earlier in their life. Sudden cardiac arrest, not to be confused with a heart attack, refers to the abrupt loss of heart function, breathing and consciousness that most typically results from an electrical disturbance in the heart that causes it to stop pumping blood to the rest of the body. If not caught and reversed with a defibrillator within minutes of onset, death will occur

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