Even in the middle of a heart attack, women are less likely than men to think their symptoms are heart-related and more likely to get bad advice from friends or family about seeking medical care, according to new research.
Most people assume that the typical heart attack patient is male, says René Martin, R.N., Ph.D., of the University of Iowa, so women and the people around them tend to look for other explanations of their symptoms, such as stomach problems.
But misreading warning signs can lead to delays in medical care and worse outcomes for heart attack patients, Martin and her colleagues say.
Their work appears in the journal Health Psychology.
Compared to male participants, women in the study said they were more surprised when finally told they had a heart attack, a view consistent with stereotypes about heightened male heart disease vulnerability, Martin says.
In their study of 109 men and 46 women, Martin and her colleagues looked at the patients’ experiences from the time their symptoms began to when they first encountered medical care.
Men and women in the study had comparable medical histories and were equally likely to report the most common symptoms of a heart attack: chest pain, shortness of breath and fatigue. Both men and women most often assumed that gastrointestinal problems caused their discomfort.
Overall, 60 percent of the patients did not realize that their symptoms indicated a heart attack, Martin says.
“But women were significantly less likely than men to attribute their symptoms to cardiac causes,” she says.