Nohe 90s Americana Bernardine Healydirector of the National Institute of Public Health, spoke for the first time about “weaker sex syndrome”, which pushes healthcare professionals to underestimate the woman’s symptoms, with repercussions on clinical outcomes.
Heart attack is different in men and women
For example, the signs of a heart attack in a middle-aged man are known, with a pang in the chest and pain radiating to the arm. But one a woman does not feel stabbing pain in the chest in at least one case out of fiveaccording to a 2013 study. It happens because the blood clots that cause myocardial infarction, thrombi, form mainly in the small, peripheral branches of the coronary arteries and not, as in humans, in the main branches.
Heart attack the most common symptoms in women
The most common symptoms in women are:
• shortness of breath and difficulty breathing;
• back pain, often mild;
• neck, shoulder and jaw pain;
• slight sense of weight or discomfort on the chest.
Different at heart
It is the faded symptoms that make women go to the emergency room later. For March 8th the Italian Society of Emergency Medicine and urgency therefore launches “Different in the heart”: in the emergency rooms there will be trained doctors who will test a new rapid test, the Chest Pain Test, to identify important cardiac events in patients with chest pain.
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