Peter Attia· MD
But the nomenclature at the time that I was a medical student was you defined myocardial infarction, so MI, by the presence or absence of the Q wave. So you mentioned on the EKG, there was this big deflection that happens early on, and that represents depolarization of the ventricle. So the biggest, largest mass in the heart is your left ventricle. So that's the pumping chamber that pumps blood out to the body. And that has a very strong electrical signal. And if in certain areas, regions on the EKG, so we do 12 leads and it creates a vector and we can basically recreate the heart in three dimensions. And so you're doing that by putting these leads, these electrodes across the chest and on the arms and the legs. And if after somebody had a heart attack, they developed a Q wave in certain leads that signaled to us clinicians that they had what we at that time called a Q wave myocardial infarction. And what that meant was that there was transmural or all the way through cell death. So the entire wall, there had been an actual necrotic, basically we had become necrotic and died.