Why am I getting chest pain?

Chest pain is a non-specific symptom; this means that many different kinds of medical problems can cause you to have pain in your chest. People have been taught to think that chest pain indicates a heart attack (meaning a sudden decrease in blood flow through the coronary arteries supplying the heart). While this is an important cause of chest pain and should not be overlooked, it is not the only one. Another heart-related cause of chest pain, angina, may resemble a heart attack but usually resolves on its own. Angina is due to a temporary or incomplete blockage of a coronary artery, whereas a heart attack occurs when the blockage is complete and there has been permanent damage to the heart muscle. Chest pain is not necessarily heart-related – it can be due to gastrointestinal causes, such as reflux disease (so-called "heartburn"), or pulmonary (lung) causes, including pneumonia, asthma, pulmonary emboli (blood clots in the lung), and pulmonary arterial hypertension.

The way chest pain feels may depend on its cause. For example, the pain that people feel from angina and heart attacks is typically described as a pressure sensation ("it feels like there is an elephant sitting on my chest"). In contrast, asthma, a problem of muscle spasms around the airways in the lungs, usually causes people to feel a sensation of "tightness" in their chest. Patients who describe their chest pain as more of a "burning" sensation would probably make their doctor think about acid reflux or heartburn.

In trying to determine the cause of your chest pain, you may want to think about how you would best describe what you are feeling, what seems to bring the pain on or make it better, how long it seems to last, and whether the sensation moves around at all or just stays in one place. This sort of information may help your doctor narrow down the list of possible causes and figure out why you are having pain.