Heart Attacks Ambushing Women?

According to Dr. Aristotelis Vlahos, the medical director of interventional cardiology at Riverview Medical Center in New Jersey, "Fifty percent of heart attacks are entirely silent, a number that's even higher in women and diabetics." But why is it higher with women? Women often do not take the range of heart attack symptoms seriously (upset stomach, shoulder pain, toothache, flu-like symptoms, hand tingling, fatigue) or they attribute them to other, more common ailments.

More than twice as many women die from cardiovascular disease than from all forms of cancer combined. That is a frightening statistic. But what is the healthcare industry doing about it? More often than not, women are making it more difficult to save themselves.

The American Heart Association published a study in 2010 that revealed 46% of women who, when suffering from heart attack symptoms, would do something for themselves other than call 911, such as take an aspirin, go to the hospital, or call the doctor.

Wasting precious time.

The Women’s Heart Foundation reports that heart attacks strike more than 430,000 women annually and kill more than 260,000. To put that in perspective, that is six times the amount of women who die from breast cancer each year. Another 31, 837 women die each year from congestive heart failure, representing 62.6% of all heart failure deaths.

According to the WHF, nearly two-thirds of the deaths from heart attacks in women occur among those who have no history of chest pain but even with statistics like that, women comprise only 24% of participants in all heart-related studies.

Did you know that women receive fewer interventions to prevent and treat heart disease?