More about Cheney's heart attack. How many can one person have?
The news that former Vice President Dick Cheney suffered his fifth heart attack Monday and was admitted to a hospital, where apparently he is recovering nicely, naturally raises the question of how many heart attacks one person can have.
Five heart attacks may seem like a lot, but it really isn't, experts said. Physicians have become better at diagnosing very small heart attacks that might have passed by unobserved in the past, and improvements in therapy have made large, killer heart attacks less common.
The tests for troponins -- cardiac enzymes released from damaged heart muscle during a heart attack -- have become very sensitive and "can pick up a very small amount of heart damage," said Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a cardiologist at UCLA's Reagan Medical Center. "If the attacks are very small, there would not necessarily be any substantial impairment of heart function."
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