Cardiac arrest and heart attack are different. Cardiac arrest is when the heart stops pumping, caused by arrhythmias, blockages, electrolyte imbalances, or trauma. A heart attack is a blocked coronary artery from plaque rupture. A heart attack can trigger cardiac arrest, but usually doesn't.
So I hear people use the terms cardiac arrest and heart attack interchangeably, and they are not. So a cardiac arrest is when your heart stops, which could be for a lot of different reasons. It could be because you had a heart attack and therefore your heart stopped, but it also could be because you had an arrhythmia for whatever reason, which can be from blockages. It could be also from electrical issues. Sometimes it can be from whatever reason you stopped breathing, therefore your heart stops working.. It could be from electrolyte derangements, like really high potassium, which then causes an arrhythmia and causes your heart to stop. Um, there are also some genetic reasons as to why someone might have cardiac arrest. Um, or if you remember the football player from a few years ago around Thanksgiving, I don't recall who it was, but got hit in the chest really hard and then had a cardiac arrest. Um, so there are various reasons for that. A heart attack may cause a cardiac arrest, but most of the time it does not cause a cardiac arrest. So a heart attack is when a piece of plaque, which is normally made out of cholesterol, which could be calcified over time, but a piece of plaque breaks off, which we call a rupture, and then completely occludes the artery because then platelets start aggregating around it as well. And that is a heart attack, and that's what causes the generally tremendous chest pain that people get when they go to the hospital with a heart attack. Now, can cause cardiac arrest, but not always. So cardiac arrest and heart attack, not synonymous words.
