Patients who experience pain one year after a heart attack may be more likely to die within the next eight years, according to a study published Aug. 16 in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
While it's common to feel pain after a heart attack, patients who continued to report "moderate or extreme pain" — including pain from conditions other than heart disease — a year after the cardiac incident had a higher mortality rate compared with adults who experienced a heart attack but did not feel pain afterward, the study showed.
"Participants who said they had extreme pain after a heart attack were more than twice as likely to die during the study period compared to those who reported no pain," according to an Aug. 16 American Heart Association news release.
The study, which was conducted at the School of Health and Welfare at Dalarna University in Falun, Sweden, analyzed data from 18,300 adults who suffered heart attacks. Nearly 45 percent of the study participants had reported pain a year after their heart attacks, the news release said.