Many women may not realize their greatest health threat isn’t cancer; it’s heart disease.
In 2023, heart disease led to one in five female deaths in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. However, the CDC also found that only 56% of women were aware of the risks.
“It is the leading killer of women at all ages so, starting at the age of 18, more women will die of heart disease than breast cancer,” Dr. C. Noel Bairey-Merz, a professor of cardiology and director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai, told ABC News.
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Although doctors have long described women’s chest pain as more likely to be “atypical,” Bairey-Merz said that’s not an accurate description.
“You’re not supposed to use that term anymore because it is misleading,” she said. “It suggests that women, who are 51% of the population, are atypical compared to 49% of men. That doesn’t make sense.”
Historically, cardiovascular disease research has focused largely on men, Bairey-Merz explained.
For example, what people often think of as classic symptoms of a heart attack — clutching chest pain, sweating and pain radiating down the left arm — may be typical for men, but not always for women.
When a woman has a heart attack, she is more likely to feel pain in the upper back, arm, neck and jaw, according to the American Heart Association (AHA).
In a multiple-study analysis published in the Journal of the American Heart Association in May 2020, women had higher odds of pain between the shoulder blades, nausea and vomiting and shortness of breath, and lower odds of chest pain and sweating associated with a heart attack.
“In fact, both women and men can present without a ‘typical pain’ feeling,” Dr. Harmony Reynolds, director of the center for women’s cardiovascular health and associate director of the cardiovascular clinical research center at NYU Langone Health, told ABC News.
Women are 30% less likely than men to report chest pain when having a heart attack, according to the AHA. Women may perceive more of a discomfort rather than outright pain, Reynolds said. They are also more likely to report multiple symptoms compared to men. (Yahoo News)
