How Long Is It Before I Can Return To Work After A Heart Attack?

— -- Question: How long until I can return to work after a heart attack?

Answer: I get the question all the time, "When can I return to work after my heart attack?" And it is extremely variable depending on the type of heart attack that you've had.

If you've had a major heart attack, it's possible that a large portion of your heart has been damaged. And we can gauge that by a clinical term called the 'injection fraction' which we can get from a variety of clinical tests. We also look at what an individual's physical fitness is, or cardiorespiratory fitness.

And most significantly, what are the demands of the job? Is someone planning on going back and working at a computer terminal, or are they going back to a manual labor type job?

Certainly all those factors will play a role, but increasingly we find that patients often times within six to eight weeks, can return to work after a heart attack.

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