Women need to be more vigilant about chest pains: Study
23 Oct 2012
Women have been urged to be more vigilant about chest pains. Medical staff has also been urged to more proactive in their treatment of women suffering heart attacks.
Heart disease and heart attacks were more common in men, which led some doctors to think women rarely suffered them, according to the research.
According to a study conducted in Brittany, women were twice as likely to die from their heart attack as men and those who lived stayed in hospital for longer and had more complications.
The findings were presented at the Acute Cardiac Care Congress 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.
According to Dr Guillaume Leurent, from the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire in Rennes, these results suggested that women needed to be more vigilant about chest pains and request medical help quickly to reduce ischemic time (duration the heart muscle was starved of oxygen).
He added, women might take longer to call an ambulance when they had chest pains as they did not believe it could be a myocardial infarction (heart attack) as most women believed myocardial infarction was a male problem.
