(Reuters) – women, especially young women, are more likely than men to go to the hospital without pain or discomfort in the chest after suffering a heart attack, and also have more probability of dying from this disease than men of the same age, according to an American study.
The lack of symptoms may be result of late medical care and differences in treatment, said the researchers, whose findings were published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
“ it is possible that not even they know that they are suffering from a heart attack,” said John Canto, Watson clinic in Lakeland (Florida), and who worked at work.
The researcher emphasized that although the results are based on a study of more than one million patients who suffered heart attacks, they are still preliminary.
, However, added that they are challenging the notion that the discomfort and pain in the chest should be considered “key symptoms” for all patients with heart attacks.
“If our results are in fact true, I would argue that rather than the message pointing to the symptom brings together all cases, consider that message to say that women under 55 years of age have increased risk of atypical symptoms”, said to Reuters Health.
Such “atypical symptoms” may include problems breathing or pain in areas as the jaw, neck, arms, back and stomach.
Singing and his colleagues analyzed medical history in a national database of patients with heart attacks between 1994 and 2006, including about 1.1 million people in nearly 2,000 hospitals.
Researchers found that 42 percent of women and 31 percent of patients men did not provide pain or discomfort in the chest.
The likelihood of this sort of “atypical symptoms” differs more between young women and men, the researchers said.
Women also tend to be larger than males when he suffered his first heart attack. In this study, the difference in age averaged seven years.
Age of 45 women were 30 percent more likely than men of the same age group of attack without any pain in the chest. The number fell to 25 percent for ages 45-65, and the difference disappeared after age 75.
A similar pattern was seen in the likelihood of death by heart attack, albeit with minor differences between the genera.
At least one part of that difference could be due to the lack of action by patients and doctors when the symptoms are unusual, said Patrick O’Malley, internist of the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in Bethesda, Maryland.
“Tend not to think of a heart attack in young women if they have no pain in the chest (…)” and so we aren’t so aggressive. “This delayed treatment,” said the doctor, who did not participate in the study.
