Detecting Heart Attacks
Doctors usually can tell whether a patient has had a heart attack by looking for changes on a test of the heart’s electrical activity called an electrocardiogram and by checking for certain enzymes in the bloodstream. For a heart attack that might have occurred in the past, doctors look for changes on an electrocardiogram called a Q-wave, which is a marker for damaged tissue. However, silent heart attacks may not result in Q-waves accordingly to a recent hear disease research conducted by Dr. Han Kim of Duke University in North Carolina. This heart disease research was published in the Public Library of Science journal PLoS Medicine.
