Heart attack symptoms are often different for women and men, sometimes with deadly consequences.
When a woman has a heart attack she's less likely than a man to experience "classic" symptoms, such as sudden overwhelming chest pain, and more likely to feel less obvious heart attack symptoms, including shortness of breath, weakness, unusual fatigue, a cold sweat and dizziness.
Although this is pretty widely known, a big, brand new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association sheds more light on this gender-based difference in symptoms, and found that many women experience no chest pain at all during a heart attack. This is true of some men too, but more common with women, especially younger ones. Disturbingly, the researchers also found that women who had heart attacks without chest pain were significantly more likely to die from them than men, especially when the women were under 55.
The researchers point out that rates of death after heart attack have decreased significantly for both genders over the past decade, and that the gap between women and men is narrowing.
But it's important to keep the results of this study in your mental "need to know just in case" file, so you'll know to take action if you or a loved one experiences heart attack symptoms that don't feel quite how you'd expect them to. This study reminds me of something that made its way around the internet last year called "An ER Nurse's Description of a Heart Attack", in which a nurse who had an out-of-the-blue heart attack describes how it felt. I can't verify that it's a true story, but nobody has debunked it, and I think it's definitely worth a read.
