For a large part of the stated chest pain, no organic causes are found. After a thorough physical, apparatus and laboratory examination, a psychosomatic component or a psychiatric cause should be considered. In the case of psychiatric illnesses, such as depression, psychosis or a disease mania, patients increase into the smallest complaints, without a heart disease being present.
Today there are clinics with so-called psychosomatic, cardiological departments that deal with this problem. Patients with hypochondria or heart neurosis can also suffer from the clinical picture of a heart attack. These patients are so afraid of dying of a heart attack that they can actually cause heart problems due to psychogenic factors. Even after bereavements or life crises, heart or chest pain or pulling in the chest are often reported by patients, which must always be followed up first.
Chest pain in children
Chest pain in children is relatively common and usually without serious cause. In most cases, the complaints occur in adolescents between the ages of 12 and 14. The cause is usually the intercostal neuralgia already mentioned above, functional chest wall pain or psychogenic factors, which are less often manifested in childhood in the form of an anxiety neurosis. Rather, it is social anxiety, such as the fear of talking in front of a class etc., that can trigger chest pain symptoms.