Heartburn or Heart Attack? Know the Symptoms

If you aren't sure whether you are having heartburn or something more serious -- like a heart attack -- you should get checked out, say experts at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

The most common symptom of coronary heart disease is chest pain (angina) or discomfort, which can also occur in the shoulders, arms, neck, jaw or back. People may mistake this pain for indigestion, which can be dangerous.

"Sometimes, it's impossible to tell the difference between the symptoms of heartburn, angina and heart attack," Prediman K. Shah, director of the Division of Cardiology and the Atherosclerosis Research Center at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, said in a prepared statement.

Heartburn Drug Linked to Bad Breath

If you take drugs like Prilosec or Prevacid to treat your chronic heartburn or acid reflux disease, you may end up with another unwanted problem -- bad breath.

New research reveals the class of medication that includes those drugs -- known as proton pump inhibitors (PPIs) -- is linked to halitosis or bad breath.

PPIs reduce the production of acid by blocking the enzyme in the wall of the stomach that produces acid.

Doctors in Brazil studied 23 adult patients with acid reflux disease (GERD) and 17 patients with indigestion. They found 39 percent of the GERD patients had bad breath, and in at least 75 percent of the cases, taking a PPI was one of the reasons. Also, 18 percent of indigestion patients had bad breath.

Heartburn Drugs Might Slow Heart Failure

Over-the-counter antihistamine drugs used to treat heartburn and acid reflux might be useful against chronic heart failure, a Japanese study suggests.

It's a small study, including only 50 patients. But the results point to possible benefits for many of the 23 million Americans with heart failure, a potentially fatal condition in which the heart cannot pump blood effectively, said a report in the Oct. 3 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

"It's still very early, because we know very little about who might benefit from it or what drugs might be best,"...

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Book Review : "Healthy Digestion The Natural Way..."

Title : Healthy Digestion the Natural Way: Preventing and Healing Heartburn, Constipation, Gas, Diarrhoea, Inflammatory Bowel and Gallbladder Diseases, Ulcers, Irritable Bowel Syndrome and More
Author : Lindsey Berkson
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Layman's bible and more

I cannot tell you enough how good this book is - after ploughing through trees of print, here is one that just gets to the point and is interesting as well. It is also set out so that you do not have to read the first half to understand one page near the end.

Very readable, even just for information. People without problems should find the details in this text interesting and good guidance.

How Heartburn Works...

When the muscle that is supposed to prevent stomach acid from escaping up into the esophagus gets to weak to do its job and the acid keeps on gushing back to the esophagus, that is called acid reflux. It is a lot like heart burn but a lot more uncomfortable as generally there is much more acids and pepsins pushing back to the esophagus.