Dear patient,

Thanks for your health concerns. How concerned we have to be about the origin of chest pain depends on your cardiovascular risk factors and your personal details of symptoms. Major risk factors include smoking, hypertension, diabetes, peripheral vascular disease, history of early heart attacks in first degree family members, high cholesterol; others include obesity, sedentary lifestyle, and high levels of stress. Worrisome features of chest pain include both chest pain at rest or with exertion, that is squeezing/pressure like, radiated to jaw, arms, sometimes relieved by resting, not associated with movement or breathing, associated with nausea, cold sweating, and finally lasting several minutes, from 5 to 20; that being said, there are a host of causes of non-cardiac chest pain, including psychologic issues (panic attacks, somatoform disorders), muskuloskeletal pain, esophageal/gastrointestinal causes, pulmonary causes and primary neurologic causes.


The best course of action would be to see your physicain, it could be an Internist or Cardiologist, who can run some basic history and additional laboratory tesing to determine your overall cardiovascular risk, and determine if further testing (eg. treadmill test, imaging or perhaps nothing more) might be needed. Ruling out a cardiac cause of chest pain would actually give you peace of mind, and if its not the heart, allow you and your doctors find an alternative explanatation that might be suitable to specific treatment

Hope this is useful, wish you the best health,

Dr Brenes Salazar MD
Mayo Clinic Rochester
Divsion of Cardiovascular Diseases

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