Eli5: what is the difference between a heart attack and a cardiac arrest?
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HA= blood is blocked from entering the muscle cells resulting in tissue death.
CA= Heart stops beating
Fyi, I’m not an MD, this is just a screen name.
A heart attack is when your heart malfunctions in pumping blood and isn’t able to do what it needs to, usually caused by a blockage. It can lead to cardiac arrest if the heart completely stops. Cardiac arrest is when your heart stops beating.
A heart attack is when a cardiac blood vessel becomes blocked and blood supply is cut off to a section of the heart, which will die if blood supply is not restored. Cardiac arrest is when the heart stops beating. This can (and usually is) be caused by a heart attack, but there are other causes.
What happened to Damar was a cardiac arrest. The rhythm was disrupted so his heart was beating in a disorganized fashion and failing to actually pump any blood. This was caused by his heart getting a hard strike at just the right moment. There are other things that can cause a similar disruption. If the rhythm can get restored with a defibrillator, the heart can continue beating.
With a heart attack, the heart is stopped by a blockage or some other mechanical reason. Until that gets addressed, the heart will not be able to go back to its full function.
Im a nurse working in cardiology and was once a paramedic working both pre-hospital and in a trauma center emergency department.
Heart attacks are a general term to talk about some sort of block in the arteries supplying oxygen to the heart. It could be more general, but this seems to be what most ppl think of when they are talking about heart attacks. Essentially what is happening is your heart, or a specific part of the heart muscle, is being denied oxygen and begins reacting/dying. In response you get chest-pain, shortness of breath, that pain in your shoulder and jaw, things like that. Inside the body your heart is beginning to have difficulty functioning properly. This can cause a whole bunch of changes to vital signs and the general function of your heart and the vessels (veins and arteries). Ultimately, if left unchecked this can lead to the next part of your question, cardiac arrest. (Not necessarily so cut and dry, but gets a bit more complex depending on location of the block, how much of the vessels is blocked, etc.)
On the other hand cardiac arrest means your heart actually stopped or is moving, but in a way that prevents an adequate amount of blood to pump into the body (see ventricular fibrillation or ventricular tachycardia). Your blood is no longer moving around your body. You cannot supply your other organs with oxygen or nutrients, and cannot remove the products of waste from your cells just living. This is when CPR is used. People in cardiac arrest have no pulse, no breathing, and are unconscious. Cardiac arrest can have many “causes”. Your heart could be beating too fast or erratically (V-tach/V-Fib), could cease meaningful function due to damage/sudden injury directly to the heart, long term heart disease, and many other things. The point is that your heart has stopped pumping blood either entirely, or is not functioning properly to pump enough blood. At this point you need to fix the underlying cause in-order to restart the heart. Look up “H’s and T’s” for a cardiac arrest and those are some common and reversible causes of cardiac arrest that if you fix will return circulation to the body.
This was a rough explanation, but if you would like to continue learning or would like to do something to prepare in case a loved one or someone you know experiences cardiac arrest, a great place to start is to become CPR certified. The red cross offers many classes and perusing their website would be a great start to that journey! You could also look into the American Heart Association (AHA) for more as well! I don’t know what options exist for those not in the US, sorry.
Heart attack (myocardial infarction, MI) is caused by a blockage in the coronary artery which feeds the heart muscle. The heart can still be beating, have an irregular beat, and diminished blood flow to the rest of the body.
Cardiac arrest is caused by interference with the heart’s electrical systems / signals that regulate rhythm. Cardiac arrest can be caused by several different causes (disease, scarring, drug use, or heart attack / MI).
* “Heart attack” is a colloquial term that covers any kind of sudden heart issue. It’s not a precise medical term.
* Cardiac arrest is specifically when the heart *stops beating normally*, stops pumping blood, either just stops completely or gets stuck in a fluttering, ineffective contraction pattern (fibrillation). It can be caused by a variety of factors, from blood loss to bullet holes, electical shock, severe electrolyte imbalance, or like in a certain football player’s case, a blow to the chest in just the right spot at just the wrong time.
Something like a myocardial infarction, where the arteries feeding the heart muscle get blocked, would still be a “heart attack”, in fact it’s usually what people have in mind when they use the term. The chest-clutching pain is because your heart muscle is trying like hell to keep doing its job even as it’s dying due to a failing blood supply.
BSN student here! An analogy I like to use for the heart is to think of it as a car.
A car has both mechanical and electrical components that need to be in working order for the car to function, and you need gas for the engine to work. So for example even if you have a full tank of gas, if you have an electrical issue (say your alternator is broken), your car won’t start. If your electrical is fine but you run out of gas, well your car isn’t going anywhere either. If you have a huge air bubble in your gas line, your car may sputter out for a second as it’s deprived momentarily of gas but may continue going afterwards. Or it may just fuck your shit up completely.
Your heart function is the same. There are mechanical and electrical functions that work together. Your brain sends electrical signals to the heart that stimulate the mechanical parts (the heart muscle, which is the “engine”) to squeeze and pump the blood (gas) through the body (also delivering the oxygen rich blood to the tissues of the heart much like a car injects fuel into an engine).
Now let’s think back the the air bubble in the line. If you get an air bubble or clot or blockage of some sort in the “fuel line” (aka the vessel delivering that blood, or “fuel”, to the heart) you cut off the oxygen supply and those tissues infarct (die from lack of oxygen). They can no longer squeeze. This is called a myocardial infarction (more commonly known as a heart attack). It’s an injury to the mechanical part of your heart (the muscle). This MAY lead to cardiac arrest (your car stopping working all together), but may not. It depends on the severity is the damage.
For cardiac arrest, think about it like your car rolling to a dead stop as you’re driving it. Maybe you have had a history of mechanical issues (heart attack, heart disease, chronic high stress, etc) that has led you here. The engine has stopped running and so your electrical pieces no longer have an energy source to keep going (heart not pumping = no oxygen being delivered to brain = bye bye to everything else). Maybe you were involved in a crash (blunt force trauma) that damaged the car so severely it can’t function. Maybe you just bought a lemon that didn’t have the wiring put in correctly and therefore was bound to fail eventually. Either way your car has stopped driving (heart has stopped beating) completely.
ER nurse here, a heart attack is when there’s inadequate blood flow to the heart usually caused by a blockage in the blood supply to the heart. Usually you will see things in the blood we can check for to tell us if someone had one, and in the case someone is having a very big one our monitoring equipment can see it, in subtle changes to the way the electricity in their heart is moving. Heart attacks CAN cause a cardiac arrest, but they don’t actually do it most of the time.
A cardiac arrest is when the heart stops beating for any reason- including a heart attack, but also many other causes.
The terms are often used as if they are the same thing but they are definitely NOT.
Heart attack is when the hearts struggling to pump blood from blockages most likely, and cardiac arrest is when the heart completely stops and cpr should be performed
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