8 Sneaky Heart Attack Symptoms Women Might Be Ignoring
Joanne Chen
Heart disease is a top killer of women, but heart attack symptoms are different than in men. Here are the top signs to look for.
Women aren’t men
There’s a big disconnect between what women think a heart attack would feel like—excruciating chest pain—and what it actually does feel like. As Jean McSweeney, RN, PhD, professor and associate dean for research at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences College of Nursing, in Little Rock, Arkansas, points out: “Other than the reproductive system, the cardiovascular system has the most differences between genders.” So it’s to be expected that the symptoms—while sometimes shared with men in a general sense—can also be experienced differently. After all, “we have much smaller vessels in our heart,” says Dr. McSweeney, who was among the first to zero in on women’s heart attack symptoms in a 2003 study, published in the journal Circulation. “And we’re constructed differently.”
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