9 Weird Symptoms Cardiologists Say You Should Never Ignore
If a middle-aged man starts clutching his chest, sweating profusely, and gasping for air, everyone knows he's probably having a heart attack. It’s the “Bollywood drama” depiction of heart problems, says Dr. Basel Ramlawi, a cardiothoracic surgeon with Main Line Health in Philadelphia. “It’s the most dramatic way—but not the most common way—in which patients present.”
Heart problems can actually be quite subtle, he clarifies, and they tend to show up differently in everyone. While someone having a heart attack might, in fact, grab their chest, others—especially women and people with diabetes, who often have nerve damage that prevents them from feeling pain—won’t necessarily experience any chest discomfort at all. Other heart conditions can appear in equally varied ways.
There’s good reason to pay attention to even the most understated symptoms: “Your heart is the lifeline of your whole body,” Ramlawi says. “It’s the pump that supplies blood to every other organ in the body, and if it doesn’t work well, then the fuel that supplies the rest of the body isn't getting to where it needs to be.”
With that in mind, we asked cardiologists to share the weird symptoms that patients often brush off—but which could actually signal a serious heart problem.
A sinking feeling in your chest
People who have experienced heart palpitations describe their symptoms in interesting and wide-ranging ways, says Dr. Edo Paz, a cardiologist at White Plains Hospital in New York and senior vice president of medical affairs with the app Hello Heart. Some say it feels like a goldfish is flipping around in their chest. Others report a sinking feeling. “Imagine that feeling when you’re in an elevator and it starts to descend quickly, and everything drops,” he says.
Even if you’re tempted to brush off the strange sensations, it’s important to bring them up with your doctor, who will likely do an EKG and send you home with a heart monitor. It’s possible you could have a heart rhythm disorder like atrial fibrillation, or Afib. “When we're trying to evaluate palpitations, we want to identify whether there's an actual arrhythmia underneath it,” Paz says. “An arrhythmia is not a symptom. That’s a diagnosis.” He suggests keeping a log of when you experience palpitations, as well as what might have triggered them: a fight with your spouse? Exercising? Many of his patients also take advantage of the ECG feature on their smartwatch, which provides useful data for their doctors.
