Is Your Heart at Risk?
Know these subtle signs to protect against heart disease and save your life
Chicago resident and psychologist Melissa Blount was certain her appointment with the cardiologist was nothing to be concerned about. She believed that the faint chest pain she’d been experiencing was stress, resulting from starting a family and launching a business at the start of the recession.
The news wasn’t good.
After a stress test, doctors told Ms. Blount that her left-anterior-descending artery, a vital blood vessel running along the front of her heart, was 95 percent blocked. She’d narrowly missed a massive heart attack – one that likely would have killed her.
“I’d had warning signs for six months: fatigue, shortness of breath, anxiety, and I’d ignored it,” Ms. Blount says. “I felt like the whole thing was an out-of-body experience because it happened so quickly. I wasn’t diabetic. Not obese. Didn’t smoke. Didn’t look sick. But I was.”
Know the Signs
Heart disease kills more women than men each year in the U.S. and is the number one killer of women, more so than breast cancer or lung cancer. The warning signs of a heart attack and heart disease are subtle in women, and not represented by the traditional images of a heart attack victim, making it tough for women to recognize the reality.
“There’s a classic picture used to illustrate heart disease for medical students: it’s an overweight, middle-aged male. He has his fist up to his chest, he’s sweating and he has a cigarette in his mouth,” says Joan Briller, MD, an associate professor of medicine and director of Heart Disease and Women Programs at the University of Illinois-Chicago. “But in women, it’s often very different. This depiction just isn’t right for us.”
In women, the warning signs for a heart attack can be as subtle as discomfort in the lower jaw, back or left arm; indigestion or nausea; fatigue and loss of stamina; and any lasting sensation in the chest, from irregular heartbeat to significant pain or pressure.
Marla Mendelson, MD, a cardiologist and medical director of the Program for Women’s Cardiovascular Health at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, notes that several studies show that both women and men exhibit chest pain before a cardiac event, but women rarely think about the pain being their heart.
“It’s much more important that women recognize that they could be at risk for cardiac disease, because the symptoms might not be what you see on television. They’re much more subtle,” Dr. Mendelson says. “It’s a case of recognizing that you’re a woman at risk for heart disease, so when you get chest pain when you climb stairs, it could be your heart and you should have it checked out.”
An American Heart Association study points to a continued disparity in care between the sexes when experiencing a cardiac event in the emergency room. The study Get With the Guidelines suggests that women who go to the emergency room with a heart attack receive different medications and, often, slower treatment than men.
Annabelle Volgman, MD, a cardiologist and director of the Heart Center for Women at Rush University Medical Center, says she sees the problem firsthand. The best thing a woman can do is arm herself with information.
“Once a heart attack is identified, whether it’s in a man or woman, there shouldn’t be any disparity in care, but there is,” she points out. “This has resulted in a mortality rate of almost twice as much in women as men. In men, there was a 5.5 percent death rate for those who came to the emergency room for the most serious heart attack, versus 10.2 percent mortality in women,” explains Dr. Volgman. “I would empower and educate women to say, ‘I am having chest pain. I have these risk factors and am concerned that I’m having a heart attack,’ because once that’s been said, it gets the ball rolling. That’s why education is so important: women need to know what the risk factors are and they need to know if they have those risk factors.”
Tagged as: doctors, heart disease, heart health, health and wellness and health screenings
is a freelance writer and editor based in Chicago. An experienced and award-winning features writer, she has worked both in newspapers and magazines, and covered a variety of issues, from the arts and politics, to education and business. When she’s not writing, the native Hoosier loves exploring her new home in Chicago.
