You can still have heart attack with negative stress test

A question that we get asked all the time, "Can you still have a heart attack if your stress test was negative?" Or sometimes people want to know what kind of warranty they have if they just had a negatve stress test. "So does this mean I can't have a heart attack?"

Any one at any time can have a heart attack! 

Even if you have had a negative angiogram (cardiac catheterization), you can still have a heart attack. All a stress test tells us whether or not you have significant coronary artery disease. If you have some blockages of 50% or higher, your stress test can be positive. Then we do a cardiac catheterization to see if we can fix any of them. If your blocakges turn out to be over 70%, we fix then. If you have 3 or more vessels that need to be fixed, you will do better with open heart surgery.