Women Die More of Heart Attack than Men

It has been uncovered by a recent report that female patients tend to die more in number of a heart attack as compared to males. The reason behind the same is their failure to recognize symptoms related to heart attacks and get immediate treatment for the same.

The report has found that women often do not realize standard symptoms of chest pain like men during heart attack. Therefore, women who get heart attacks fail to report about telltale symptoms and get cure, thereby dying in hospitals.

As per the report findings, it is because of the gap faced in getting treatment that causes more number of deaths in women. Doctors and medics showed frustration that women are less aware about symptoms of heart diseases and even public-health groups have been failing to make them aware at the maximum.

Reports reveal that where women tend to die at a pace of 15%, pace of occurrence of deaths amongst men is much low i. e. 10% as told by John Canto of the Watson Clinic and Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Florida. He also affirmed that almost 42% of women under the age of 55 years do not experience the classic heart attack symptom i. e. chest pain or any kind of pressure. However, the figure is only 31% amongst men.

The new study, published in the journal Circulation, and sponsored by the American Heart Association's Council on Clinical Cardiology, looked at 25,000 patients with severe heart attacks and 78,000 patients in all. What it found was that women suffering from heart attacks are less likely to receive recommended medications in a timely fashion or undergo procedures to treat artery blockages.

In this study, women with heart attacks tended to be older and have more chronic medical problems than men, which likely accounted for some of the difference in death rates.

However, among patients with a certain type of severe heart attack - called an ST-elevation myocardial infarction, or STEMI - women were almost twice as likely to die as men. Specifically, while about 5 percent of men died, 10 percent of women died.

Even when the researchers made adjustments for age and other risk factors, women still had a 12 percent higher risk of death in the hospital. And during the first 24 hours of hospitalization, women with STEMI were about twice as likely to die as men.

Lead study author Dr. Hani Jneid, assistant professor of medicine at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, emphasizes that "this population of women [with major heart attacks] needs to be taken care of very aggressively" during early hospitalization. Jneid noted, however, that more research is needed to confirm their findings on early deaths in women.

It has been told to the reporters that alongside women patients, women doctors also fail to perceive whether or not a woman is at risk of getting heart attack in near future. "It's been sinking in to cardiologists for a while that women having heart attacks are more likely to have symptoms other than the classic chest pain syndrome that we see in the movies", said Cam Patterson, chief of cardiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.