{"id":5574,"date":"2018-03-20T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2018-03-19T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/herheart.org\/2018\/03\/20\/scad-heart-attack-thats-striking-young-women\/"},"modified":"2018-03-20T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2018-03-19T13:00:00","slug":"scad-heart-attack-thats-striking-young-women","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/area54.thedct.net\/herheart\/scad-heart-attack-thats-striking-young-women\/","title":{"rendered":"SCAD: The Heart Attack That’s Striking Young Women"},"content":{"rendered":"

[vc_row row_type=”row” use_row_as_full_screen_section=”no” type=”full_width” angled_section=”no” text_align=”left” background_image_as_pattern=”without_pattern” css_animation=””][vc_column][vc_column_text]By Jennifer Clopton<\/em>[\/vc_column_text][vc_empty_space height=”10px”][vc_column_text]\"\"<\/p>\n

Christine Shockey suspected she was having a heart attack when she awoke at 2 a.m. with excruciating pain shooting down her left arm.<\/p>\n

But it took medical professionals 5 days to figure it out — a delay that changed her health forever.<\/p>\n

Shockey went to the ER to have her pain checked out and told the doctors that 8 days earlier, her 43-year-old sister had a type of heart attack called spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD.<\/p>\n

The mother of two living in Council Bluffs, IA, was 42 at the time, a runner with no known health or heart problems.<\/p>\n

Doctors did an electrocardiogram (EKG) on Shockey, and the results came back slightly abnormal. A blood test also found some proteins called troponins in her blood that are released when heart muscle is damaged during a heart attack.<\/p>\n

Despite this, she says doctors diagnosed her with gastric reflux and anxiety. While they kept her for 2 days, they refused repeated requests by her family to do an angiogram to get a better look at her heart.<\/p>\n

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A SCAD heart attack starts with a tear in the wall of an otherwise normal artery.<\/p><\/div>\n

She was still having arm pain when she was released, so Shockey went to her primary care doctor. He diagnosed her with shingles — even though she didn\u2019t have a rash.<\/p>\n

With the pain still not going away, Shockey was able to get an appointment with a doctor the next day at the University of Nebraska Medical Center at Omaha, just across the Missouri River from Council Bluffs. When he did an EKG, he immediately announced she was having a heart attack and said she\u2019d been having it for the last 5 days — since her symptoms started.<\/p>\n

He handed her his personal cellphone before rushing her into surgery. \u201cHe told me to call my husband and tell him goodbye because he wasn\u2019t sure he could save me,\u201d Shockey says.<\/p>\n

Her heart was damaged so much, it couldn’t pump the way it should. The main artery to her heart was torn from the top of her heart to the bottom. Although doctors restored blood flow to it by using a stent, her heart never fully recovered.<\/p>\n

That was in 2015. Two-and-a-half years later, she is back to work and a fairly normal life, although she still has unexplained chest pain, takes heart medication, and must avoid vigorous activities that could put too much pressure on her heart.<\/p>\n

\u201cI have had to make some peace with the experience, but certainly I am angry because I think in my mind, I was simply too young, too fit, and too female for all of those doctors to recognize what was happening to me,\u201d Shockey says. \u201cThere is no way that if I was a man and I had come in with those symptoms that I would have been turned away and told you just have anxiety. I think if I was a man, I would have been taken seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/section>\n<\/div>\n

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What is SCAD?<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Unlike a more typical heart attack caused by a buildup of plaque in the arteries, a SCAD heart attack starts with a tear in an artery. The tear blocks the artery and blood flow to the heart, leading to a heart attack. (See this animation<\/a> from the Mayo Clinic.)<\/p>\n

Although SCAD causes a small percentage of heart attacks overall, it\u2019s responsible for 40% of heart attacks in women under the age of 50. And it\u2019s mostly happening to young women — more than 90% of SCAD patients are female.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is an important cause of heart attacks among younger people, and it has really only been in the past 4 or 5 years that our thinking on it has changed. For the past 100 years, we had been missing it,\u201d says Sharonne N. Hayes, MD, of the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota — a renowned SCAD researcher.<\/p>\n

Many researchers have been rushing to learn more about SCAD and are starting to better understand how it works and how to treat it. The American Heart Association released the first scientific statement about the condition in February. The 35-page document reviews relevant research and says, among other things, that conservative treatment is generally best. There isn\u2019t yet enough high-quality evidence on the condition to write guidelines for treatment.<\/p>\n

Still, Hayes says the statement is badly needed to make people aware of it and improve diagnosis rates. SCAD patients are generally healthy and don\u2019t have or do the usual things that can lead to heart attacks — like smoking, diabetes, or being overweight — so SCAD is often misdiagnosed and may lead to treatment that can cause more artery damage.\u201cSCAD is happening to a group of women who appear healthy, are thin, and have no risk factors. So even though they have classic heart attack symptoms, they are often being misdiagnosed,\u201d Hayes says. She says like Shockey, many SCAD patients are sent home from hospitals in the middle of a heart attack that isn\u2019t discovered for days.<\/p>\n

Heart attacks are typically diagnosed with bloodwork and an electrocardiogram (a test showing the heart\u2019s electrical activity with lines on paper), but SCAD can only be diagnosed with an angiogram (an X-ray test using special dye and a camera to take pictures of blood flow in the coronary arteries).<\/p>\n

Symptoms include:<\/p>\n