Nearly Half Of All Heart Attacks Occur Without You Even Knowing It

A heart attack might not hurt as much as you think—in fact, you might not even know you had one, according to research from the Wake Forest School of Medicine.

In the study, researchers added up the number of clinically-diagnosed heart attacks and “silent” heart attacks—events that were undiagnosed at the time but were confirmed by electrocardiogram (EKG) afterwards—that occurred in more than 9,000 people during a 9-year follow up.

They discovered that 45 percent of all the heart attacks were silent.