Chest pains? Sounding a false alarm would be embarrassing, wouldn’t it? But if it’s a heart attack, every minute of treatment counts. More than a million Americans have heart attacks each year, and in half the cases, they’re fatal, according to the National Institutes of Health.

“Heart attack victims often deny that the sensations they are experiencing are actually a heart attack,” cautions Dr. Michael Chen, assistant professor of Medicine at the University of Washington’s division of cardiology. The predictor of a potential heart attack is recurrent chest pain, triggered by exertion that is then usually relieved by rest.

The actual heart attack may occur over several hours as the heart tissue is deprived of blood and begins to deteriorate and die. Heart attacks occur when one or more arteries supplying blood to the heart is blocked by a buildup of cholesterol. A heart attack is the common definition of what doctors refer to as myocardial infarction. Sometimes early indications of a heart attack occur days or even weeks before the attack.

If early symptoms go undetected, breathing difficulty increases. You may feel a tingling or numbing in your left arm and in the chest as pressure builds. Women, having a heart attack, often identify pain in the back of the jaw, as well. You may feel sweaty or nauseous and light-headed. Once often fatal, today’s victims frequently survive heart attacks. But immediate attention is necessary because heart attacks can bring on ventricular fibrillation. That’s heart arrest, usually resulting in death if not treated within minutes.

There’s a new blood test, however, that could predict whether a person is going to have a heart attack. MyHealthNewsDaily reports that if the new test proves accurate, it could predict a heart attack two weeks before it occurs. This is vitally important to seniors; about 85 percent of people over age 65 die of heart disease in America.

Although doctors can easily detect a heart attack that is under way, thousands of patients leave a physician after having passed a stress test only to be hit with a devastating heart attack within weeks.

The new finding for early prediction involves tracking in the blood a kind of cell called a circulating endothelial cell. Such cells form a wrapper that lines the inside of blood vessels. When the vessel is damaged, the endothelial cells break away and go into the blood stream.

The new research could “possibly address the greatest unmet need” facing cardiologists, said Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist at the Scripps Translational Science Institute in San Diego.

A person, even with a mild cholesterol build up, can develop a crack in the wall of an artery which disrupts the lining and sends the cells into the bloodstream. Scientists detected circulating endothelial cells in 1999 in heart attack patients. But there wasn’t the technology then to isolate the cells and study them.

The Scripps team of researchers studied blood samples from 50 patients with confirmed heart attacks and 44 healthy control patients. They established that the heart attack patients had more circulating endothelial cells — about five times as many as the healthy persons. Cells from the heart attack group also were clumped together.

“The ability to diagnose an imminent heart attack has long been considered the Holy Grail of cardiovascular medicine,” said study researcher Dr. Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute.

Dr. Robert Harrington, a professor of medicine at Duke University, said the research will help scientists to understand the biology of heart attacks. But he advised that more study was needed to confirm the results and put together a test for patients. The research may be too complex for use in a doctor’s office or even in the typical emergency room.

One key detail that isn’t yet known is how long before a heart attack do the circulating endothelial cells appear.

On another front, Boston cardiologist James Muller has been on a hunt for years to develop a way to determine who is likely to have a heart attack. His company, Infraredx, Inc. has developed a tool that analyzes deposits of cholesterol using ultrasound and infrared spectroscopy. His device takes 30,000 readings of the chemistry in a matter of a couple of minutes. But scientists have debated whether finding “vulnerable” clumps of plaque would make much difference.

To analyze the plaque, a catheter has to be inserted into an artery leading to the heart. Some are skeptical whether this could lead to predicting heart attacks. So, science marches on.

When congenital heart disease may occur, doctors say a healthy lifestyle, a balanced diet and reduced stress are key elements to successfully fighting the likelihood of heart attacks.

Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.