A 60-year-old man came to an outpatient clinic with one complaint: he had been hiccuping for a month. He reported no chest pain and no other symptoms. Blood work and a heart tracing told a very different story. He was having a heart attack caused by a completely blocked coronary artery.
The case, from cardiologists at Mogadishu Somali-Turkish Training and Research Hospital in Somalia, was published in Case Reports in Cardiology on Feb. 20, 2026. The authors described persistent hiccups as the only sign of an ST-elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), the most serious type of heart attack, as "exceedingly rare," with only a few cases reported.
