A new study found that women are more at risk of dying from heart attack than men. Researchers linked it to doctors often misdiagnosing their symptoms as there are gender differences in identifying the symptoms.
According to the American Heart Association, most heart attacks start slowly with mild pain or discomfort on the chest area and some other parts of the upper body. There is also shortness of breath and other signs such as cold sweat, nausea, and light-headedness.
Researchers from the University Hospital Basel led by cardiologist Dr. Maria Rubini Gimenez examined the medical records of 2,475 patients from emergency rooms in nine hospitals based in Switzerland, Spain, and Italy. There were 796 women from the group who complained of acute chest pain between April 2006 and August 2012.
The current diagnostic probing used by the doctors include 34 characteristics to rule out if the patient has experienced heart attack or just an acute chest pain. Patients were often asked to rate the level of pain, its location, its radiation path (from the shoulders or abdomen), and the duration of the pain.
Their analysis revealed that only one out five patients were diagnosed with heart attack—22 percent were women while 18 percent were men. About 92 percent of the participants complained of chest pain or discomfort and similar symptoms described by both genders.
“We should stop treating women differently at the emergency room when they present with chest pain and discomfort,” wrote Dr. Maria Rubini Gimenez.
Out of 34 characteristics of heart attack, three of them were different. Men often report less than 30 minutes of pain duration while women exceed 30 minutes. Another was that men report of decreasing level of pain as symptom of heart attack while women experience increasing level of pain preceding a heart attack. However, the researchers admitted that they will need further studies to establish the gender differences of the symptoms due to data inconsistency.
The study was published in the Nov. 25 issue the JAMA Internal Medicine.
