Non-cardiac chest pain

Thoracic pain and discomfort are symptoms that lead many patients to the presentation in private practice or emergency admissions in hospitals. It is one of the most common complaints in the acute care setting. Attendant symptoms like agitation and fear are often signals of unstableness, but can also be alarming symptoms of an acute emergency. At first it is the main purpose to exclude an acute life-threatening event, such as acute coronary heart syndrome or pulmonary embolism. If a cardiac cause is excluded, the spectrum ranges from reflux disease and other oesophageal disorders to functional and vertebral thoracic pain. These other causes need an interdisciplinary assessment. The aim of this article is to summarize the differential diagnoses of non cardiac chest pain. The causes of non cardiac chest pain encompass a vast spectrum of various diseases with different needs of diagnosis and therapy. © Georg Thieme Verlag KG Stuttgart.