Diabetics usually lack the typical heart attack warnings

Diabetics often lack typical heart attack warning signs

Every year around 300,000 people in Germany suffer a heart attack. In the acute case, quick action can save lives. Most warning signs indicate an imminent infarct. In diabetics, however, this is often not the case.

Some meet it "clear sky"

According to health experts, around 300,000 people in Germany suffer a heart attack each year. Although many people are hit by a heart attack from "clear sky", often there are already warning symptoms. Quickly detecting a heart attack can be life-saving. Alarm signs include severe chest pain, sometimes radiating to the left arm or lower jaw. In people with diabetes, however, such warning signals are often missing.

A heart attack is often indicated by warning signs such as severe chest pain. In diabetics such alarms are often missing. (Image: michaeljung / fotolia.com)

Around seven million diabetics in Germany

As reported by the German Heart Foundation in a recent communication, about seven million people in Germany have diabetes mellitus (diabetes mellitus) known.

Although diabetics are often afraid of the typical late complications of diabetes such as blindness, kidney failure or amputation, they underestimate the increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

And although it is precisely these patients can often meet, because the risk of fatal heart attacks in diabetes is greatly increased, British scientists reported last year. Especially women make diabetes more susceptible to a heart attack.

Weak sensation of pain

According to the foundation, diabetic patients suffering from a heart attack usually lack the severe chest pain typical of the infarction, and thus the decisive warning sign for their life-threatening situation.

"Especially long-term diabetics often have a very weak sense of pain for typical heart attack warning symptoms such as chest pain, so that for these patients, the heart attack is often the first symptom of a long existing calcification of the coronary arteries," said Prof. Dr. med. med. Dr. H. c. Diethelm Tschöpe from the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Heart Foundation.

In diabetics, the long-term hypoglycaemia leads to the disturbance of the nervous system, so that they do not feel the typical chest pain as a result of the circulatory disorder of the heart muscle.

Have risk factors checked

According to Prof. Tschöpe, diabetes patients, but also patients with coronary heart disease (CHD), should have their family doctor check the heart attack risk factors such as high blood pressure, elevated blood sugar, high cholesterol and triglyceride levels and overweight.

Chronic high blood sugar promotes atherosclerosis (arteriosclerosis) as a cause of heart attack and stroke, so that in men with diabetes the risk of heart attack is two to four times and in women six times (after menopause even more) increased.

"Diabetes and heart problems are a dangerous combination: Because diabetes and CHD patients often only know about their own disease for years, but none of the other, they are very vulnerable to infarction - even though they may have been receiving specialist treatment for years ", Says the expert.

Allow blood glucose levels to be measured regularly

For example, if a diabetic complains of frequent respiratory distress, it may be indicative of heart failure as a result of untreated CHD and undetected high blood pressure.

Patients with CHD or other heart disease are more likely to have diabetes than 60 percent.

Alone in patients with chronic heart failure affects about a third of those affected at the same time of diabetes. The increased blood sugar damages all vessels and thus favors the development and progression of heart failure.

"Cardiac patients with CHD, heart failure or atrial fibrillation should therefore check their blood glucose (fasting blood sugar) with their doctor at regular intervals and insist on this blood test."

Such blood sugar tests are easy to perform by the family doctor or internists and diabetologists.

If the diagnosis is diabetes, immediate consistent treatment to normalize blood glucose levels is important so that the high blood sugar does not damage the blood vessels and thus the oxygen supply to the heart and the whole organism are not affected. (Ad)