What Is Unstable Angina?

Unstable angina, along with stable angina and myocardial infarctions (heart attacks), is the effect of the same cause for all - coronary artery disease (one of many heart diseases that negatively affect your life). Sometimes, there will be too much plaque in your coronary arteries and they'll rupture, and there will be a scab on top of the plaque.

That scab is a blood clot that blocks the flow of blood and oxygen to its section of heart muscle. When any living tissue is deprived of blood and oxygen, it dies. A heart attack is the death of heart muscle.

When there's a blood clot forming on the plaque, there will be an increase of blockage, but the blockage may not be complete. The blood will move much slower and that will cause pain, or angina.

Because the blockage is there to restrict the flow of blood, the pain will be present - even while you're resting. Sometimes, the angina can be around for so long because the blood flow has been slow for a long time and part of the heart muscle will die because of long term abuse.

Over the last decade, doctors have improved their ability to detect the cell death in patients with unstable angina. This is largely due to the development of more sensitive detection methods for troponin, an enzyme.

Troponin is a heart muscle protein that's released into the bloodstream when cells of the heart muscle die. As methods for detecting the presence of troponin get better, they're able to detect even the minutest of cell death in patients, saving them from more serious heart attacks.

If you have coronary artery disease, then you should suspect unstable angina if you seem to have pains - even if you aren't exerting nearly as much as you usually do. You should really look into it if you have pains while you're resting, pains that lasts longer than normal, or if you don't seem to be able to get rid of the pain with the normal dosage of nitroglycerin.

These are usually red flags to a newly-formed or developing clot on some artery-hardening plaque. The people who are in the highest risk category for fatality associated with unstable angina are those who have no history of coronary artery disease because they're not informed on the warning signs and classic symptoms, such as pressure in the chest.

This is sometimes described as a squeezing sensation, and often radiates into the left arm or the jaw. Just as there are "classic" symptoms, there are many people who do not show classic symptoms.

They may have very mild discomfort in the back or the abdomen or any other area that borders the chest. Others may feel nausea or have heartburn. To be safe, if you're at least middle-aged and if you're in at least one risk category for coronary artery disease, then you should know about the symptoms that might represent angina.

Doctors can detect unstable angina by using an ECG. If you have symptoms while you're resting, then doctors will treat you as if you have unstable angina. They'll typically try to check your body for the presence of troponin to see if you're experiencing heart muscle death.

In the past, the damage was sometimes so small that most doctors believed there was no damage, until they noticed that the enzyme troponin was being released in any damage situation. Since that discovery, more and more patients have been accurately diagnosed with heart muscle death.

The two methods for treating unstable angina are either with drugs (to see if the condition worsens), or to treat with drugs and plan for surgery to take care of the coronary arterial disease present in the body.

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