Heart Attack and Cardiac Arrest in Men

Heart attack and cardiac arrest can kill you or leave you sickly, bedridden, and depressed. Here's what every guy needs to know about preventing heart attacks and cardiac arrest.

Why should I care about heart attacks and cardiac arrest?

You might assume that a heart attack or cardiac arrest is something you only need to worry about when you’re older. But sad to say, heart problems are all too common in younger men. After accidents (such as car crashes), heart disease is the most common killer of men between the ages of 35 and 44. In men 45 to 54 years old, it’s number one.

In fact, you’re never too young to start fretting about this stuff. The American Heart Association now recommends that people start heart disease prevention at the tender age of 20 — a time when we were a lot more likely to be spending our petty cash on beer than on blood pressure monitors and baby aspirin.

Not to be horribly dreary, but look at it this way: In the long run, the odds are about one in three that you will die of cardiovascular disease. So why not try to put that grim event off as long as possible — or prevent it altogether?

What are heart attacks and cardiac arrest?

You’ve heard the terms a million times. But do you know what the difference between a heart attack and cardiac arrest is?

The cause of a heart attack (a.k.a. myocardial infarction) is pretty easy to understand. It’s essentially a plumbing problem. As any schoolboy knows, the heart is really a pump that circulates the blood throughout your body. But like all pumps, it needs an energy supply to work — in this case, a flow of blood with oxygen and nutrients.

Sometimes the arteries that feed the heart — called the coronary arteries — get clogged up with a combination of fats, clotted blood, and other nasty stuff. If a blood clot suddenly blocks off a clogged artery altogether, the heart stops getting the fuel it needs, the cells start starving and dying, and the pump can stop working.

Cardiac arrest is different. While a heart attack is a plumbing problem, cardiac arrest is electrical. Your heart is triggered to beat with regular electrical impulses. But if these electrical impulses become erratic — causing an irregular heartbeat called an arrhythmia — the pump may not work. When you see heroic TV doctors shouting “Clear!” and shocking a flat-lining patient with paddles, they’re dealing with cardiac arrest. They’re trying to electrically jolt the heart back into the correct rhythm. When it’s fatal, cardiac arrest is known by the doleful name “sudden cardiac death.”

While they’re different problems, a heart attack can sometimes lead into cardiac arrest.