Women & Heart Health

Women spend their lives taking care of others. But when you think about it, by taking care of yourself, you are taking care of others... ensuring that you will be able to continue to fulfill your vital role in their lives.

71% of women experience early warning signs of heart attack with sudden onset of extreme weakness that feels like the flu - often with no chest pain at all. Medical professionals are challenged to respond to women's milder symptoms, acting with insufficient guidelines.

Nearly two-thirds of the deaths from heart attacks in women occur among those who have no history of chest pain.

Men's plaque distributes in clumps whereas women’s distributes more evenly throughout artery walls. This results in women's angiographic studies being misinterpreted as “normal”.

Women wait longer than men to go to an emergency room when having a heart attack and physicians are slower to recognize the presence of heart attacks in women because “characteristic” patterns of chest pain and EKG changes are less frequently present.

Women & Heart Disease

So, You're at the Peek of Health!

I was speaking to a friend the other day, and she was explaining that her and her husband were updating their wills.
Now they are both in their 50's and in relatively good health. I knew there was more to this story.
It turns out that about 9 months ago an associate of hers at the VA hospital went home sick with a headache and backache. She thought she was coming down with the flu.
She got home, and tried everything to gain relief from these symptoms. On her way home, she called and stopped by her doctors, to make sure that everything was all right. He saw her, could not diagnose her symptoms, and sent her home with a mild pain medication for her back, in case she needed it.
That evening she died of a massive heart attack.
She was in peek health. She even went to the doctor.
They both did not consider the fact that her family has a history of heart disease.

So often women exclude themselves from suspicion of heart disease. Our culture used to be one where mostly the men worked high stress jobs, or physical jobs. But that is not the case any more, and one cannot ignore recent statistics that show that:

• Worldwide, 8.6 million women die from heart disease each year, accounting for a third of all deaths in women. Three million women die from stroke each year. Stroke accounts for more deaths among women than men (11% vs 8.4%) with additional risk for CHD unique to women related to oral contraceptive use in combination with smoking.
• 8 million women in the US are currently living with heart disease; 35,000 are under age of 65. Four million suffer from angina.
• 435,000 American women have heart attacks annually; 83,000 are under age 65; 35,000 are under 55. The average: 70.4.
• 42% of women who have heart attacks die within 1 year, compared to 24% of men.
• Under age 50, women’s heart attacks are twice as likely as men’s to be fatal.
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  267,000 women die each year from heart attacks, which kill six times as many women as breast cancer. Another 31, 837 women die each year of congestive heart failure, representing 62.6% of all heart failure deaths.

http://www.womensheart.org/content/HeartDisease/heart_disease_facts.asp