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Out of Breath After a Flight of Stairs? It Could be Heart Disease

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Out of Breath After a Flight of Stairs? It Could be Heart Disease

Mar 23, 2021

Do you ever have discomfort in your chest after a long walk? Out of breath after going up a flight of stairs? These may be potential warning signs of coronary disease. On today's Health Minute, Dr. Steven Lofgren talks about the seemingly minor signs of heart diseases you should be on the lookout for.

Episode Transcript

Interviewer: Do you have chest discomfort, or are you short of breath when you're walking from the parking lot to the grocery store or maybe taking a flight of stairs? Dr. Steven Lofgren, what could be causing that?

Dr. Lofgren: One of the potential causes of these symptoms would be coronary disease or heart disease. That can be caused by a restricted amount of blood flow to the heart muscle itself.

Interviewer: And if somebody's suffering from these symptoms, what do you recommend that they do?

Dr. Lofgren: We would absolutely want to have a patient with these symptoms have what's called a stress test done. A stress test is nothing more than putting the body under some degree of stress and seeing how the heart performs. Benefits of doing this test is you can have an immediate diagnosis of a potential blockage in one of these coronaries, which then can be fixed very simply with a process called angioplasty. If you find that you have these symptoms, it is absolutely critical that you go in and see your doctor for further testing.


updated: March 23, 2021
originally published: April 1, 2019

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