The American Heart Association has recommended that young patients who come in with heart attack-like symptoms - but don't have heart disease risk factors - should be screened for cocaine use.

"The drug can cause chest pains, shortness of breath, anxiety, palpitations, dizziness, nausea and heavy sweating - all symptoms of a heart attack. 'Not knowing what you are dealing with and giving the wrong therapies could mean death rather than benefit,' said Dr. James Reiffel, professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University Medical Center/New York Presbyterian Hospital."

Although the drug causes heart attack-like symptoms, it rarely causes actual heart attacks. The AHA statement goes on to say that young people with cocaine-associated chest pain should be monitored so they're not given potentially life-threatening medications. Source: San Mateo Daily Journal

Labels: cocaine, heart_attack, hospitals

Warning to emergency room doctors: Cocaine reactions look like heart attacks. If you treat a cocaine patient like a heart attack victim, you could kill him.

The American Medical Association reports that cocaine reactions cause the same symptoms as heart attacks: chest pain, shortness of breath, anxiety, palpitations, dizziness, nausea, and heavy sweating. However, if a doctor uses clot-busting drugs or beta-blockers, which are typically used to treat heart attacks, he could cause a lethal reaction in a cocaine user.

"Not knowing what you are dealing with and giving the wrong therapies could mean death rather a benefit," said Dr. James Reiffel, professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University Medical Center in New York.

Almost 200,000 people, many of them under 25 years old, go to ERs every year because of cocaine reactions. The number of cocaine-related ER visits rose 47 percent between 1995 and 2002.

Labels: cocaine, death, hospitals