For people with heart conditions, niggling chest pains can cause panic, distress and sleepless nights in hospital waiting rooms.

“I was caught in a vicious circle,” says Arif Hasan, who has a history of cardiac problems and has suffered from pains in his chest, shoulder and upper back for the last ten years. “From the moment I first felt any pain, my initial thought was, ‘I am having a heart attack.’ So I panicked, and this caused me further distress. I tried everything from stress therapy to hypnotherapy, but nothing seemed to work. It was making my day-to-day life unbearable.”

More than 230,000 people in the UK have heart attacks each year, and around 30% of these are fatal. So it’s no surprise that people with histories of heart attacks or other heart conditions worry about their health.

In fact, the stress is as debilitating as the condition, with constant trips to the Emergency ward or to the doctor’s to check if chest pain is a genuine problem or something more harmless.

Now, a home electrocardiograph (ECG) device offers a solution, helping to reassure patients and diagnose heart attacks quickly, before lasting damage is done. And they only cost around £200, with a monthly £30 service charge. The device could also save the NHS at least £46M per year, with 90,000 fewer A&E visits and 45,000 less hospital admissions across England.

In 1997, Arif Hasan had an angioplasty procedure to unclog an artery. Yet even after the procedure had been performed, he continued to have pains in his chest, upper back and shoulder region.

“I didn’t know where the pain was coming from. I was worried that the operation may have caused further complications,” explains Hasan. “The stress and worry of not knowing what was happening to me brought about an onset of panic attacks, and these alarmingly had similar symptoms to the heart conditions I suffered from.”

Hasan has been admitted to hospital countless times in the last 10 years. Not knowing how to judge the seriousness of the pain himself, Hasan spent numerous nights in A&E waiting for test results and was often kept in for observation. More often than not, the pain was due to his other conditions and not cardiac problems. In his frustration Hasan had even enquired about purchasing an ECG machine to relieve him of the to-ing and fro-ing by being able to self-test at home.

He was told this wasn’t possible as it wasn’t just a case of knowing how to measure the heart’s activity, but also knowing how to read the results.

The common symptoms of a heart attack - chest pain, upper back and shoulder pain, can often be passed off as feeling “under the weather”. Various other medical conditions manifest similar symptoms to those of a heart attack, making it difficult to identify the actual problem. Only an ECG reading can truly reveal whether or not the symptoms are indicative of a heart attack. So the only way to judge the gravity of the sort of chest and upper body pain that Hasan has been suffering from was to go to hospital and be tested by cardiologists.

Until now, that is. Today, Hasan uses a palm-sized ECG device that records the electrical activity of his heart in minutes. Wireless technology is then used to transmit the results down a phone line to a cardiac monitoring centre. A team of trained cardiac nurses and doctors immediately check the reading and within minutes the patient knows the seriousness of his or her condition

“The ECG monitor has improved my quality of life beyond belief, it has saved me time and energy and I no longer suffer from stress or panic attacks,” says Hasan. “The moment I have any pain I can do a cardiac self-test and send it off for evaluation. Within a matter of minutes I know if the symptoms are related to my heart condition or not - without the need of having to go into hospital.”

And he’s not the only one whose quality of life has been improved by the innovation. Dr Edward Vernon, a retired GP from Staffordshire, has had three heart attacks and suffers from arteriosclerosis - a chronic thickening of the arteries, impairing blood circulation and increasing heart attack risk. He’s spent hours in hospital awaiting test results.

“The trouble with heart attacks is, they don’t know about opening times, or emergency service waiting times,” says Vernon. “I used to attend hospital then, after an ECG revealed that nothing was wrong, I would feel like I had wasted everyone’s time, but I didn’t want to take any risks.”

“Having three heart attacks, you tend to be very fearful of it happening again. I know wherever I am, if I’m holidaying in Cornwall or even abroad, Broomwell Healthwatch can quickly relay my medical history and ECG reading to the emergency services if required.”

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