“The absence of chest pain does not mean that it’s not your heart.”
When you think about a heart attack, you probably picture someone clutching their chest and falling to the ground with their breath totally knocked out of them. But the truth is, especially for women, symptoms of a heart attack can be much more subtle, which means those symptoms can often go untreated.
Although heart attacks are often thought of to be more common in men, heart disease is actually the number one killer of both men and women, accounting for about 1 in 4 deaths in women in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But even though heart attacks are so common in women, there’s still one big problem: “There’s the perception that a woman would never think she’s having a heart attack, so she’s going to think it’s everything else but,” says Marla Mendelson, MD, associate professor of cardiology at Northwestern Medicine. (Read up on how one cardiac nurse ignored her heart attack symptoms for nearly a week.)
In order to be able to recognize when it could be happening to you, it’s important to first understand what exactly a heart attack most commonly is. “Essentially what’s happening is that the arteries in the heart are unable to provide sufficient blood flow to the working heart muscle, and most commonly this is due to atherosclerosis, this plaque that builds up in the arteries,” says Erin Donnelly Michos, MD, associate director of preventive cardiology at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
And although plaque naturally builds up over time, a heart attack occurs when that plaque ruptures suddenly, says Dr. Michos. “The plaque ruptures, and a clot forms suddenly,” she says. “And there can be a complete obstruction of blood flow down the artery of heart.”
When that obstruction or blockage happens, it causes the heart muscle to begin to die. “This is why it’s an emergency, because if the heart muscle dies, it doesn’t repair itself,” says Dr. Michos. “Time is muscle.”
That means it’s crucial for women to be able to detect some of the symptoms they might be experiencing during a heart attack, and since February is American Heart Month, now’s the perfect time to take note. Below are some of the most common heart attack symptoms all women should be able to recognize.
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