[susan53]

No. When you're talking about any type of illness you can see it as an abstract phenomenon ..

Her horse died of colic

or as a single incidence

Her horse died of an attack of colic.

The problem with "heart attack" is that the word "attack", which usually indicates a single incidence, is this time incorporated into the name of the disease itself. This is what, I think, pushes most people towards using the indefinite article.


The medical term for heart attack is "myocardial infarction" and there, interestingly, the tendency is reversed. I found 3,660,000 examples of the term used without the article :

Males are at higher risk of myocardial infarction than women

and only 216,000 with the article :

The authors extrapolated from this that the use of NSAIDs increases the risk of a myocardial infarction.

This backs up what I said before I think. Doctors and medical researchers are more likely to see disease as an abstract phenomenon. "Ordinary" people, on the other hand, are likely to see it as something that happens to you - a single incidence. The choice of the article or not rests on the meaning that the speaker wants to express.

Grammar exists to allow us to express different meanings, and you choose what you want to mean. The concept of grammar as "rules" regarding word classes is, in most cases, a myth.