Why does angina occur?

Hi, I'm Sukhneja. I'm an interventional cardiologist working in central London. One question that we often get asked is, why does angina occur? So what is angina? Angina is typically thought of as a symptom from the heart. But truly, when we are referring to angina, we are talking about a tightness across the chest that occurs whenever we do activity, but that goes away when we rest. rest. So you can imagine that you may be exercising on the road, walking to work, doing some activity in the garden. You may feel some chest tightness, you may feel a band like discomfort across the chest and sometimes that pain or discomfort will move up into your neck or into your arm. In fact either arm can be affected by angina. When the individual stops their activity and takes a moment to rest, that discomfort should go away. And if it does so fairly quickly or after stopping, then that typically gives us a diagnosis of typical angina. Angina is caused when there is insufficient blood supply to the heart muscle. The heart is a pump and works hard whenever we do any activity. It has its own blood supply supplied by the coronary arteries and they sit on top of the heart. If they fur up, then this will cause a discomfort the chest that we refer to as angina. There can be angina due to other reasons. In some cases people have it because they have narrowing of the micro vessels and we call that microvascular angina and that requires very sophisticated tests to formally diagnose. In some patients it's caused because there is a narrowing of the one of the heart valves, typically the aortic valve which is vitally important. Whenever the individual does activity they may feel chest tightness. There are some other conditions as well for example there are some heart muscle conditions like hypertrophic cardiomyopathy and this is where the heart muscle has become too thick and cannot supply itself with enough blood. Other conditions can also cause chest tightness for example some patients have become anaemic and don't have enough blood whilst others may have lung conditions that can cause a tightness in the chest for example certain types of asthma or chronic obstructive airways disease, COPD. A common thing that causes chest discomfort but is not related to the heart are gastric issues. Some patients may have reflux or a gastric ulcer that can cause similar symptoms and be mistaken for the heart. So what to watch out for are symptoms of an exertion, a symptom that radiates or moves upward into the neck or moves into the arm and these features are typical of angina. So in this video we've discussed what the potential causes of angina are. Thank you.