Usually, if you ate having any one of these symptoms by itself, the cause is probably not too severe. Heavy sweating can be the result of anxiety or fright, and a pain that runs down your left arm may be caused by a pinched nerve in your neck.
When the symptoms occur all at the same time, however, they are the classic signs of a heart attack, and you must get help immediately.
Certainly the body language of a person who’s having a heart attack can be frightening. He or she will be pale in color, sweating heavily, and possibly vomiting. Heaviness in the chest can last for a minute or two to several hours, and the pain can radiate from the chest into the left arm but may stop at the shoulder. On rare occasions, the pain can radiate into the right arm, but don’t let the fact that the pain is appearing in your right arm instead of your left change your opinion that you’re having a heart attack. The pain usually causes a person to be quiet and not to move much.
A heart attack occurs when one of the coronary arteries that supplies the heart with blood becomes blocked, usually as a result of arteriosclerosis. The supply of blood to an area of the heart muscle is suddenly interrupted, which can result in permanent damage to the heart, since the interruption of blood causes the heart muscle supplied by that vessel to die; this is what initially causes the severe pain and the other Body Signals.
After a heart attack, a person will usually be able to recover fully, unless a major portion of the heart muscle is destroyed.
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