American scientists have found that women are more vulnerable to heart attacks than men. This occurs because women ignore heart attack symptoms.
The researchers from Yale University have interviewed 36 women aged 30 to 50 years who were taken to hospital with a heart attack. The scientists had previously collected information that 15,000 American women, who were younger than 55 years, died each year from strokes, making this disease one of the 10 most dangerous diseases in this age group. During hospitalization, women also were twice as likely as men to die from a heart attack.
Study author Judith Lichtman says they really wanted to understand what is happening in the mind of a woman when she is faced with the symptoms of a heart attack. Based on the above mentioned discussions, the researchers concluded that the majority of women had a family record of heart diseases, as well as other risk factors, including diabetes and hypertension. Nevertheless, they still ignored heart attack symptoms, such as severe pain in the chest and dizziness.
This was because women simply could not believe that they were experiencing a heart attack at such a young age. Thus, the 53-year-old woman told the researchers that her father had heart problems from the age of 45 years. However, she did not expect that the same thing would happen to her. Although heart attacks are more frequent among older women, the researchers wanted to study those who did not reach 55 years of age, which was due to the fact that women in this age group die from heart attacks much more often than men.
