Fewer women, particularly younger one are more likely than men to suffer from heart attack with no chest pain symptoms, suggests a new US study. In general men have singnifcantly more heart attacks, but women under the age of fifty-five are more prone to die from heart attacks.
Lack of classic symptoms such as chest pain can result in delayed medical care or some women may not be getting the right kind of treatment. The symptoms of heart attack may include a dull pain, ache or heavy feeling in the chest, a mild discomfort in the chest that makes you feel generally unwell and chest pain accompanied by feeling light-headed or dizzy.
Dr. John Canto, and colleagues from the Watson Clinic in Lakeland, Florida, worked on the report by analyzing the medical records in a national catalog of heart attack patients from 1994 to 2006. They found that that about thirty-one percent of male patients did not exhibit any chest pain or discomfort, compared to forty-two percent of female patients.
Women under the age of forty-five were thirty percent more likely than men in their similar age group to present without chest pain. The difference fell to around twenty-five percent, and after the age of seventy-five, it all but disappeared. An analogous model, with slighter differences between sexes, was seen in the probability of death.
Almost fifteen percent of women died in the hospital after their heart attack, in compared to ten percent for men. Younger women with no chest pain were almost twenty percent more prone to die than male counterparts. But after the age of sixty-five, risk of women dropped below that of men.
Young women should not be having heart attacks, so when a young woman has a heart attack, there is something biologically different in that patient. Those biological differences may include variations in hormones or the way clots form in younger women, stated Dr.Canto.
He added, women, especially those who are inclined to heart attacks because they have diabetes, have a family history of heart disease or are smokers, should know that absence of chest pain does not prohibit the possibility of a heart attack. The study was reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The paper has shown that women, particularly younger women, under the age of fifty-five, often do not have the typical presenting symptom of chest pain when having a heart attack. Doctors, health care professionals should be aware and vigilant that women can have a heart attack without the typical chest pain, explained, Dr Kevin F Fox, a consultant cardiologist at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust.