Heart Attack (cont.)
What are the symptoms of heart attack in women
and how is heart attack diagnosed?
Women are more likely to encounter delays in establishing the diagnosis of heart
attack than men. This is in part because women tend to seek medical care later
than men, and in part because diagnosing heart attacks in women can sometimes be
more difficult than diagnosing heart attacks in men. The reasons include:
- Women are more likely than men to have atypical heart
attack symptoms such as:
- Silent heart attacks (heart attacks with little or no
symptoms) are more common among women than among men.
- Women have a higher occurrence than men of
chest pain that is not caused by
heart disease, for example chest pain from spasm of the esophagus.
- Women are less likely than men to have the typical findings on the
ECG that are necessary to diagnose
a heart attack quickly.
- Women are more likely than men to have angina (chest pain due to lack of
blood supply to the heart muscle) that is caused by spasm of the coronary
arteries or caused by disease of the smallest blood vessels
(microvasculature disease). Cardiac catheterization with coronary angiograms
(x-ray studies of the coronary arteries that are
considered the most reliable tests for CAD) will reveal normal coronary arteries
and therefore cannot be used to diagnose either of these two conditions.
- Women are more likely to have misleading, or "false positive"
noninvasive tests for CAD then men.
Because of the atypical nature of symptoms and the
occasional difficulties in diagnosing heart attacks in women, women are less
likely to receive aggressive thrombolytic therapy or
coronary angioplasty, and are more likely to receive it
later than men. Women also are less likely to be admitted to a coronary care
unit.
Next: What is the treatment for heart attack in women? »
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