Women?s heart attack symptoms
Although both men and women may have the same classic heart attack symptoms, including stabbing chest pain, breathlessness and radiating pain down the left arm, women are more likely to experience subtle and vague symptoms.
These include:
? Acute fatigue
? Disturbed sleep
? Shortness of breath
? Cold sweat
? Palpitations
? Anxiety
? Indigestion
? Dizziness
? Jaw pain
? Upper-back pain
or tightness
? Pain in right arm
or both arms
? Chest pain
? Nausea
It started with a vague ache between the shoulder blades. The kind you get after sitting at the computer too long, working out too hard at the gym or doing too many household chores. The kind of discomfort many women know, at least occasionally, and often live with every day.
Even when combined with unexplained fatigue, there was nothing about her subtle achy symptoms to make Julie Bradford think she was about to have a heart attack. Despite her father having had heart disease, she didn?t think she was at risk.
She was an energetic 46-year-old single mother and career woman. Someone who exercised daily, ate a healthy diet and never smoked.
Heart attacks happen to older, overweight, out-of-shape men, right?
Wrong. Almost dead wrong.
Bradford?s symptoms escalated through the day ? sweating, dizziness and aching in the jaw ? until a co-worker called paramedics (despite Bradford?s reluctance), and doctors found that two arteries in her heart were 99 percent blocked. Bypass surgery followed. If treatment had been delayed by only a couple of more hours, she could have died.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in American women, killing one in three. Breast cancer, on the other hand, still the most feared disease by many women, kills one in 30, according to the American Heart Association. In fact, cardiovascular disease claims more women?s lives than the next three causes of death combined ? about 420,000 each year. And, while heart disease most often strikes post-menopausal women, it kills more than 10,000 younger than age 50 annually.
?I was shocked. My (primary care) doctor was shocked. Everyone who knows me was shocked,? said Bradford, of San Diego, who had stents implanted in her arteries to keep them open nearly a year ago. ?I was healthy. I was young. I was fit. I didn?t think I was ever at risk for something like this. I didn?t have any of the typical symptoms.?
That?s part of the problem. Too many people don?t recognize their risks for heart disease, doctors say. And too many women expect to have the classic ?elephant sitting on your chest? pain that men often experience when having a heart attack. With more research finally being done on female heart disease, medical experts are finding that not only are women?s risks and symptoms for cardiovascular disease sometimes different from men?s, so are their treatments and prognoses.
?Over the last 20 years, the mortality rate has decreased for men with heart disease, but not for women. The reason is the atypical presentation of symptoms in women,? said Dr. Sharon Sadeghinia, a cardiologist at Sharp Grossmont Hospital. ?Most women think they?re having a (cardiac episode) only if they have crushing chest pain and feel like passing out, but in real life, that?s a very minor presentation. The severity of the pain does not indicate the severity of heart disease.?
Source: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2012/oct/30/get-heart-smart/
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