Chest Pain

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Basics

• Summary
• Start Here
• Diagnosis and Tests
• Treatments and Therapies

Learn More

• Specifics

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Research

• Clinical Trials
• Journal Articles

Resources

• Find an Expert

For You

• Children
• Patient Handouts

Summary

Having a pain in your chest can be scary. It does not always mean that you are having a heart attack. There can be many other causes, including:

• Other heart problems, such as angina
• Panic attacks
• Digestive problems, such as heartburn or esophagus disorders
• Sore muscles
• Lung diseases, such as pneumonia, pleurisy, or pulmonary embolism
• Costochondritis - an inflammation of joints in your chest

Some of these problems can be serious. Get immediate medical care if you have chest pain that does not go away, crushing pain or pressure in the chest, or chest pain along with nausea, sweating, dizziness or shortness of breath. Treatment depends on the cause of the pain.

Start Here

• Chest Pain (Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research) Also in Spanish

Diagnosis and Tests

• Heartburn or Heart Attack: When to Worry (Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research) Also in Spanish
• Stress Tests (National Library of Medicine) Also in Spanish

Treatments and Therapies

• Chest Pain: First Aid (Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research) Also in Spanish

Specifics

• Costochondritis (Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research)
• Heart Inflammation (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) Also in Spanish
• What Is Angina? (National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute) Also in Spanish

Clinical Trials

• ClinicalTrials.gov: Chest Pain (National Institutes of Health)

Journal Articles References and abstracts from MEDLINE/PubMed (National Library of Medicine)

• Article: Impact of chest pain on mortality in patients with acute pulmonary...
• Article: Diagnostic performance of a point-of-care high-sensitivity cardiac troponin I assay among...
• Article: Characterizing chest pain in patients with acute coronary syndrome at Vietnam...
• Chest Pain -- see more articles

Find an Expert

• NIH Pain Consortium

Children

• Chest Pain in Infants and Children (American Academy of Family Physicians) Also in Spanish
• Costochondritis (For Parents) (Nemours Foundation) Also in Spanish

Patient Handouts

• Chest pain (Medical Encyclopedia) Also in Spanish