Chest pain that cardiologists can't explain
A racing heart, a tight band across the sternum, a sudden stabbing sensation, these are the symptoms that send people to a cardiologist first. When the ECG comes back clean and the stress test shows nothing, the default conclusion is "you're fine." Anxiety-driven chest pain, however, is not imaginary. It is caused by sustained activation of the sympathetic nervous system, which releases adrenaline and cortisol, constricting blood vessels and forcing the heart to work harder. A 2017 Lancet study on the global burden of disease estimated that anxiety disorders affect roughly 45 million Indians, and a significant proportion of them first present to general physicians or cardiologists with chest symptoms rather than to a psychiatrist. If you have had two or more cardiac evaluations that returned normal results but the chest pain keeps returning, anxiety is a clinically plausible explanation that warrants investigation.
