11:04 Apr 1, 2012 |
English language (monolingual) [PRO] Medical - Medical: Cardiology | |||||||
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| Selected response from: Jack Doughty United Kingdom Local time: 15:52 | ||||||
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SUMMARY OF ALL EXPLANATIONS PROVIDED | ||||
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5 | cardiac spasm |
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4 | sudden abnormal contraction of a heart muscle. |
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sudden abnormal contraction of a heart muscle. Explanation: See reference. Example sentence(s):
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cardiac spasm Explanation: Hi Shirley, I have left the English wording unchanged because the term is too ambiguous to permit anything more specific. A cardiologist would not use this wording. The source speaker is obviously not a sophisticated healthcare professional. ;-) Mr. Jack Doughty has made a suggestion which, though linguistically correct, is not likely an accurate description of what really happened. The term heart spasm can really be used to apply to one of two distinct and unrelated phenomena. As Jack has described, it could mean a sudden abnormal contraction of the heart muscle. Such contractions occur all the time in normal people. Sometimes they arise from the atria of the heart, sometimes from the ventricles themselves. The locus of the abnormality can be easily discerned from an electrocardiogram. If these abnormal contractions are sustained, they may be perceived as palpitations. Occasionally they require treatment. The other sort of heart spasm is actually a spasm of a coronary artery. This results in temporarily reduced oxygenation to the section of the heart serviced by that artery and may be perceived as chest pain. The patient may believe that he is having a heart attack. The technical name for this condition is "Prinzmetal's angina". Given that the speaker thought that she had almost died, I suspect her heart spasm was the latter rather than the former. -------------------------------------------------- Note added at 16 hrs (2012-04-02 03:49:55 GMT) -------------------------------------------------- Hi again Shirley, I had never before heard of strophanthin, but a quick review indicates that it is a digitalis-like drug, now likely obsolete. We sometimes use digitalis for congestive heart failure and some tachyarrhythmias. I found some references to the use of strophanthin in angina. Curiously, its name came up in a Web site touting some junk science challenging the notion that myocardial infarction is caused by coronary obstruction, the medical equivalent of insisting that the world is really flat. (Actually, in Prinzmetal's angina there is no structural obstruction, just coronary spasm, producing a temporary pseudo-obstruction.) That aside, it is hard to say from the text if the patient was being treated for angina, a tachyarrhythmia or congestive heart failure! Let's just call it "heart spasm"! :-) |
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