Hi,

Thanks for your question.

First, here is a definition of ischemic heart disease:

"Ischemic heart disease occurs when patients have blockages in the arteries supplying their heart (coronary arteries). These blockages are virtually always due to atherosclerosis (build-up of fats in the walls of the arteries). If these blockages get too severe, your heart will not receive enough blood when you ask it to do more work (like when you walk briskly up a hill). Sometimes, blood clots form over the blockages, and the vessel becomes completely closed. Then blood flow to part of the heart may cease completely, and that part of the heart muscle dies. This is a heart attack."

What does heart-related chest pain feel like?

By William R. Ladd, M.D., Director of Nuclear Cardiology, Cardiovascular Institute of the South

If you suffer chest pain, particularly while exercising, you will almost certainly wonder whether it might be heart-related - and well you should. Heart muscle pain - angina - is likely to be the first warning of blocked coronary arteries, the cause of most heart attacks.

While there are no infallible guidelines about whether a chest pain is heart-related, it generally takes a particular form. Heart discomfort is rarely a sharp, stabbing pain. The textbook description of angina is a feeling of heaviness, pressure, tightness or aching in the chest, usually accompanied by shortness of breath. The pain generally goes away when you stop exerting yourself, and it frequently isn't especially severe, which is, perhaps, unfortunate.

Even a heart attack may not be unbearably painful at first, permitting its victim to delay seeking treatment for as much as four to six hours after its onset. By then, the heart may have suffered irreversible damage. It is not unknown for patients to drive themselves to emergency rooms with what proved to be very serious and even fatal heart attacks.

Angina is a protest from the heart muscle that it isn't getting enough oxygen because of diminished blood supply. A heart attack is simply the most extreme state of oxygen deprivation, in which whole regions of heart muscle cells begin to die for lack of oxygen. If the blockage in the arteries serving the heart muscle can be cleared quickly enough - within the first few hours of the onset of the attack - the permanent damage can be held to a minimum.

That's why it is so vital to seek medical attention quickly if you feel the sort of pressing pain or heaviness described above. There is a 90 percent probability that pain of this type is angina. And even if it goes away, the artery blockages that caused it are still there and will grow progressively worse.

Ignoring this sort of pain because it is not unbearable or because it goes away is the worst thing you can do. It is the only warning you are likely to get of a potentially lethal condition. Heed it! Consult a cardiologist immediately.