Atypical Chest Pain
Atypical Chest Pain: How Can You Tell When To Worry?
Atypical chest pain is usually considered benign, but can help to lead doctors toward proper diagnosis of other illnesses and issues that could be plaguing you. Atypical chest pain is classified as a sharp, short lived pain on the outside of chest cavity, and does not feel like a heart attack or stroke. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t follow up or seek medical counsel when faced with this type of condition repeatedly, as there could be some underlying physical or psychological problems that you aren’t aware of. This type of chest pain may also show up in other areas and take on different sorts of pangs, so listen to your body and watch for the following symptoms.
Atypical chest pain is often mistaken for pre stroke warnings, though this is rarely the case. Of course, if you have never had a heart attack, you will not know what that pain feels like. One thing is certain with all heart disease victims: the breathing is almost always affected when symptom pain is present. Atypical chest pain may feel extremely sharp, and it may travel, but it rarely last for more than 2 minutes per episode, most of the time much less than this, and it does take the whole body captive as severe heart attack pains do. There are a few different reasons for experiencing atypical chest pain, and anxiety is the most prominent one.
Those who suffer anxiety disorders such as severe depression, panic attacks, and agoraphobia may suffer acute attacks wherein they can not recover their proper breathing rhythms, and atypical chest pain occurs throughout the episode. Under these conditions, the pain and breathing difficulties only serve to aggravate the situation, placing more anxiety onto the existing condition until the episode has overwhelmed the victim. Some panic and anxiety attacks do require medical attention, if only to sedate the victim and bring them out of the physical attack, but long term care of the psychological disorder which caused the episode is the only preventative measure that works to correct it.
You may feel atypical chest pain in many areas of the body, and it is important to seek medical advice should the pain feel deeper than the outer chest wall. Chest pains felt below the chest plate or around the lungs may not be atypical, but signs of a bigger issue. Atypical chest pain may be felt in shoots of sharp to dull pain on the sides, on the back, in both shoulders, and in both arms, primarily the right arm. Most of these pains will last only about 30 seconds at the most, though some episodes may take up to 2 minutes to subside.