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Page: << Prev | 1 | 2 | 3 | Next >> "Women in this age group may not think they're really at risk, because we mostly hear about older women," said study author Judith Lichtman, an assistant professor of epidemiology and public health at Yale University School of Medicine. "But while it's a relatively smaller group, it's not an insubstantial group."
For this pilot study, researchers interviewed two dozen women aged 18 to 55 who had had heart attacks and were admitted to one of two Connecticut hospitals. Three-quarters of the women were white, and 88 percent had a family history of heart disease.
The vast majority (88 percent) reported traditional symptoms of severe chest pain. Yet only 42 percent suspected something was wrong with their heart.
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"The chest pain was an average score of 7.4 [on a scale of one to 10], which is not insignificant," Lichtman said.
Less typical symptoms included pain in the jaw/shoulder area (experienced by 58 percent of the women); sweating (38 percent); nausea (29 percent); shortness of breath (29 percent); indigestion (21 percent) and weakness/fatigue (8 percent).
"In this young population, we're seeing a very high prevalence of traditional as well as atypical symptoms," Lichtman said.
Focusing only on chest pain could cost lives, Goldberg warned. Other studies have shown that women often have symptoms other than chest pain.
Only half of the women in this study sought care within the first hour, apparently because they thought their symptoms weren't real or weren't serious. Forty-two percent of participants thought their symptoms were something other than a heart attack; 17 percent said they were embarrassed by the symptoms; and 8 percent said they were afraid the symptoms were due to a heart condition.
Almost three-quarters (71 percent) of the women characterized their health as either just fair or poor, yet less than half believed they were at risk for heart disease.
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