Women are afraid of breast cancer, which is the cause of death of 1 per 25-30 women, yet they forget about a much greater danger to them - heart attacks. Cardiovascular disease still remains the main cause of death, especially among women.
“There still persists a misconception that it is men who are main victims of heart attacks and heart diseases. We should put an end to this myth. It is women who go down with and die of such causes the most frequently, not men," highlighted Zbigniew Zdrojewski from the Medical University of Gdańsk.
The Polish nationwide heart disease examination programme NATPOL 2011 reports that cardiovascular diseases are the cause of death of 53% of women and of 41% of men.
A death before fifty
Over the last years, the risks associated with cardiovascular diseases among young women – aged under 50 – have been on the rise. The European Society of Cardiology (ESC) highlighted that today four times more women under 50 dies due to these conditions than in the 1990s. For example, in 1995, cardiovascular disease caused 3.7% of deaths among women who had not turned 50 yet, while in 2011, this amounted to 11.6%.
This can be attributed to unhealthy lifestyles – more and more women smoke cigarettes, abuse alcohol, are overweight, do not do any sports and are at a risk of constant stress – alerts the ESC. What is more, many women are take oral contraceptives, which, when combined with smoking, increases their risk of having a heart attack threefold.
Tobacco smoke includes carbon monoxide and can aggravate or quicken the development of coronary artery disease, by damaging the arteries of the heart. According to research by Prof. Barbara Lubiszewska, Head of the Department of Coronary and Structural Heart Diseases at the Institute of Cardiology in Warsaw, women who have suffered an early heart attack were often obese, in a pre-diabetic condition, or had diabetes, and also had the high level of bad cholesterol, as well as hypertension.
“Women’s" symptoms of a heart attack
A belief that it is men who suffer from cardiovascular disease more often can cause too late diagnoses of a heart attack among women. This is due a bit different symptoms, when compared with those experienced by men, such as abdominal pain, excessive sweating, palpitation or nausea. Even trained medical professionals do not always associate these with cardiovascular disease.
However, Prof. Lubiszewska thinks this concerns only a handful of women, as the majority of them still experience classic heart-attack symptoms, with chest pain being the most prominent one. Only some women experience masked heart attacks, manifesting in epigastric pain, which can cause an erroneous or a late diagnosis.
How does the heart age?
The heart ages in a different way in both sexes. As a result, women usually start going down with coronary artery disease 10 years later than men. This process quickens, if they do not keep themselves fit. Then, women can suffer from those diseases at a younger age than men.
Diego Vanuzzo, MD, Director of the Cardiology Centre in Udine, Italy, stated that the effects of an unhealthy lifestyle accumulate in women as they grow older, which causes that, despite living longer than men, this longevity does not spell good health.
He also calculated that men live up to 85% of their lives in good shape. On the other hand, women enjoy good health only by 80% of their lives. When their health deteriorates, the most prevalent conditions include cardiovascular disease. The main reasons for such a state of affairs are still the same – an unhealthy lifestyle, smoking tobacco, the lack of physical activity, overweight and stress.
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