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A comment on Just had a heart attack. Parent comment

Re:Just had a heart attack by melling on Monday November 03, 2014 @08:13AM (#8550604)
How, about detecting one of the side effects of a heart attack? You can then evaluate if you have a problem by any of the other symptoms. If I'm experiencing chest pain and my smart watches is indicating that my heart rate is irregular, for example, maybe I shouldn't be ignoring this.
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Re:Just had a heart attack by JshWright on Monday November 03, 2014 @08:52AM (#8550728)
A heart attack isn't likely to cause an irregular heartbeat (at least not until well after the damage has been done). It's common for heart attacks to cause cardiac conduction anomalies called 'blocks', but these generally don't result in any irregularity of the pulse.
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Re:Just had a heart attack by melling on Monday November 03, 2014 @09:20AM (#8550845)
Yeah, I'm simply throwing out a strawman. I have no idea what's possible or important.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man

The important idea is that I'm not asking the wearable to tell someone that they're having a heart attack but simply indicate some one "test" is not within range.

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Re:Just had a heart attack by JshWright on Monday November 03, 2014 @09:42AM (#8550950)
Unfortunately, there aren't any tests that could be run at the wrist that would be even remotely specific for an MI.

Really the only thing I can think of is some sort of transcutaneous monitoring of troponin levels in the blood, but that's hard to do (without needles) and a late indicator... troponin levels don't start rising for a few hours after the damage has started.

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Re:Just had a heart attack by rswail on Monday November 03, 2014 @09:47AM (#8550976)
While I was waiting to go into the angiogram, I was feeling my pulse... it was weird, there was three beats, then a gap, or three regular beats and a fourth straight after the third... was fascinating to listen to...

Apparently I'm weird because I wanted to watch the angio. They kept telling me that they "didn't need my help" :)

I was saying "how often do you get to see your insides?"

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Re:Just had a heart attack by JshWright on Monday November 03, 2014 @10:47AM (#8551342)
Cool. That sounds like a pretty classic 2nd Degree Type 1 Atrioventricular Block (also know as a Wenckebach block).

If the area of infarct impacts a part of the heart responsible for electrical conduction, stuff like that can absolutely happen, but it's not especially common.

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