Queen guitarist Brian May has shocked fans after revealing he suffered a recent heart attack and was "near death".

"My medical adventures!" the 72-year-old wrote on Instagram.

"Hmm ... Sheer Heart Attack, eh? Well, I think I always worried a little bit about that album title. I wondered if it might upset some people who had actually had heart attacks."

"I'm actually quite relieved now that I'm in that club - and I don't find it upsetting at all!" he added.

"And ... why did those discs in my spine get so squished? Well I think 50 years of running around with a guitar strap over my left shoulder holding a heavy guitar might have something to do with it ! But it probably WAS all worth it!"

The health scare came just days after another medical issue, when the musician thought he had ripped his glutes during a gardening accident.

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"A week later I'm still in agony. I mean real agony. I wanted to jump at some points. I could not believe the pain," May said of his muscular problems.

"People were saying, 'That's not like a ripped muscle, you don't get that amount of pain,' so eventually I had another MRI. But this time I had one of the lower spine and, sure enough, what did we discover but I had a compressed sciatic nerve, quite severely compressed, and that's why I had the feeling that someone was putting a screwdriver in my back the whole time. It was excruciating."

"Anyway, I had - in the middle of the whole saga of the painful backside - I had a small heart attack."

The guitarist told his fans that he experienced about 40 minutes of pain in the chest and tightness, and that feeling in the arms and sweating.

He called his doctor after realising that he was having a heart attack and was driven to hospital for testing to expose underlying health issues.

"I thought I was a very healthy guy," he said in his Instagram post.

"But I turned out to have three arteries that were congested and in danger of blocking the supply of blood to my heart."

May was fitted with three stents to hold open blocked arteries - and confirmed that he's back to full health.

"I was actually very near death but I didn't die. I came out and I would have been full of beans if it hadn't been for the leg," he said.

"I walked out with a heart that's very strong now, so I think I'm in good shape for some time to come."

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