Chest pain in adolescents.

Adolescents with chest pain were compared with healthy adolescents to determine if they were more likely to believe they had cardiac disease and were less healthy than their peers. Perceptions were examined with a questionnaire and results analyzed by chi 2 analysis. Twenty-two percent of adolescents with chest pain were diagnosed with cardiac problems, a prevalence rate higher than previous reports. While knowledge of possible etiologies of chest pain was similar for both patient and control groups, 68% of those with the symptom associated their own pain with heart disease and 44% altered their behavior because of it. Health professionals should avoid inadvertent reinforcement of the patient's fear of heart disease, particularly because subsequent unnecessary self-restrictions can result in an age group in which the symptom most often represents a noncardiac etiology.