Women’s Heart Health: Fact Sheet

Heart disease is the nation’s number one killer for women. The well-known heart attack symptoms – acute pain, tightness, burning and a dull ache in the chest – describe what men typically experience during an attack. For many women the signs of a heart attack are completely different and can go unrecognized. Dr. Karla Kurrelmeyer, cardiologist at the Methodist DeBakey Heart & Vascular Center in Houston, offers the following information for women:

Symptoms

Nausea, shoulder pain and exhaustion can be the only signs a female experiences during an attack. Heart disease tends to come later in women than in men, on average 10 years after menopause. Women are more likely to die from their heart attacks.

Immediacy

Most people know to get to an emergency room immediately when they’ve identified that they’re having a heart attack. However, research shows that women go to the hospital on average one full hour later than men do after experiencing an attack. Most benefits of medical treatment occur in the first six hours after an attack, so delayed medical treatment reduces chances of full recovery. This could be due to a lack of education about onset and symptoms.