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Two of five women with a heart attack do not have chest pains
Last reviewed: 29.11.2021
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Two out of five women with a heart attack do not have chest pains. Instead, they may have such difficult to recognize symptoms as pain in the jaw, neck, shoulders or back, stomach discomfort or sudden breathing problems.
Specialists led by Dr. John Canto, director of the Breast Pain Center at the Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Florida, note that men and women with obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol or a hereditary predisposition to heart disease, should be extremely careful about the occurrence of all of the above symptoms.
The study analyzed data on 1.1 million patients who were admitted to American hospitals with a heart attack between 1994 and 2006. About 42% of them were women, moreover, on average older than men at the time of a heart attack. 35% of patients of both sexes (almost every third) did not complain of chest pains. Moreover, in women, heart attacks without chest pains occurred more often than in men: 42% versus 31%. Deaths in a hospital bed from a heart attack were also more often observed in the weaker sex: 14.6% versus 10%.
It is also established that an infarct without breast pain more often ends in death. And one of the main reasons for this is that people can delay visits to the doctor, and when calling "emergency room" or getting into the hospital do not attach special importance to other alarming symptoms, as a result of which they do not receive urgent help.
In cases of women, a higher mortality rate was also associated with biological differences in heart disease between men and women. When specialists compared the representatives of both sexes who did not experience chest pain, the risk of death was higher in women.