Too many people continue to eat unhealthy diets and avoid exercise for as long as their annual medical checkups show they are reasonably healthy. The plan has been to start worrying about health only after the symptoms show up.

The problem is that one of the potentially deadly symptoms may already have shown up without you being aware of it.

In 2015, the Journal of the American Medical Association published a truly alarming survey by David Bluemke and colleagues that concluded that 78 percent of heart attacks in the United States go unnoticed and undiagnosed.

The team examined magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of more than 1,800 people between 2000 and 2002 who were then free of heart disease. The participants’ ages ranged from 45 to 84.

Ten years later when they subjected the same participants to follow-up MRIs, the brief study span, of which 78 percent were neither noticed by the participants, nor diagnosed by medical specialists. These MRIs revealed exactly the same type of heart muscle scarring that occurs during heart attacks.

These are usually called silent heart attacks because the symptoms are so mild that those who suffer them do not notice.

Many of you may wonder why we should worry about heart attacks that are so small that they are not noticeable.

The first problem is scar tissue. When the oxygen to your heart is cut off because of, for example, arteries clogged with cholesterol, your heart muscle is damaged and begins to die. This is a heart attack.

The damage that it suffers during this event causes scar tissue. The scar tissue is more fibrous than the rest of your heart muscle, which means that it cannot contract along with the rest of the muscle. Consequently, the rest of your heart muscle has to work much harder to pick up the slack.

The second major concern is that those who have already suffered a heart attack are at increased risk of suffering another one, partly because of the damaged heart muscle, and partly because there is some underlying cause of the cut-off of oxygen to the heart that is undiagnosed and untreated.

In the past, researchers discovered silent heart attacks and heart muscle scarring via electrocardiograms (ECG), the same type of test those well-equipped physicians carry out during your yearly medical checkup. An ECG reveals changes in the heart muscle’s electrical current when it is damaged.

Unfortunately, electrical current is not sufficiently precise to pick up mild damage. In 2002, for example, a research team used ECGs and discovered that 20 percent of silent heart attacks remained undiagnosed. This new study now shows that it is in reality almost 80 percent.

The MRI technology that Dr Bluemke used can detect heart muscle scarring with far greater accuracy. Before an MRI,
you are injected with a metallic fluid that merges differently with the scar tissue than with normal tissue. A doctor can thus see even small scars quite easily.

This is worrying, as MRI scans are very expensive and not carried out during routine annual medical checkups. In other words, your regular checkup, even if it includes an ECG scan, may miss something that may kill you if it remains untreated.

This is why you must remain vigilant of heart attack symptoms, even if they are mild. If you experience chest pain, back pain, muscle pain, and severe sweating, notify your doctor, who can then perform an MRI scan.

The most important thing is, of course, to eliminate the core factors that cause heart attack:

High Blood Pressure: the most effective way to lower your blood pressure are the 3 easy blood pressure exercises found here, guaranteed to drop your BP below 120/80 – starting today…

Blocked arteries: here is the exact step-by-step strategy I used to normalize my cholesterol level and clear out my +90% clogged arteries…