Women who have heart attacks are much less likely than men to develop classic symptoms of chest pain, so they are more likely to die in the hospital, says a groundbreaking new study that tracked more than 1.1 million patients.
Because women more often lack those telltale symptoms, they're less likely to get immediate treatment to stop a heart attack in its tracks.
The gap in treatment in part contributes to female heart attack patients dying in hospitals at a rate substantially higher (15%) than for male patients (10%), says John Canto of the Watson Clinic and Lakeland Regional Medical Center in Florida, author of the study in Tuesday's Journal of the American Medical Association.
Many doctors who read the study expressed frustration at the lack of progress in raising awareness on the danger of heart disease in women, in spite of a decade-long campaign by public health groups.
Female patients -- and even female doctors -- often fail to recognize women's symptoms, says Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York and an American Heart Association spokeswoman.
"Women are coming in saying they're nauseous, they're fatigued, they're sweating, and doctors say, 'You're fine,'" Steinbaum says. "Doctors will say it's anxiety and it's all in your head."
Steinbaum says she doubts that male doctors are deliberately discriminating against women. But she notes the earliest studies of heart disease were performed in men, and women remain underrepresented in heart studies today. So doctors simply understand less about how heart attacks develop in women, she says.
The study found that 42% of women never experience the classic heart attack symptom of chest pain or pressure, compared with 31% of men. That's especially true for women younger than 55, Canto says.
Cam Patterson, chief of cardiology at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, says he was shocked by the findings.
"It's been sinking in to cardiologists for a while that women having heart attacks are more likely to have symptoms other than the classic chest pain syndrome that we see in the movies," says Patterson, who was not involved in the study.
"I was shocked, though, at how closely this was associated with worse outcomes and more cardiac death. This study makes me worried that we still don't get it. We are doing a miserable job of educating women."
To see more of USAToday.com, or to subscribe, go to http://www.usatoday.com
Copyright 2012 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.