Earlier this month, my school celebrated Go Red for Women day with a table that attempted to raise awareness about heart health for everyone. While I appreciated their efforts, I felt as if the event left a lot of very important, yet underreported, information out so I decided to remedy that here! This is coming a little bit late for the national holiday but that's okay, heart health is definitley important enough to talk about any time of the year.

I was incerdibly surprised to learn this, but, according to the U.S National Library of Medicine the symptoms that women tend to display when having a heart attack are often different than the ones doctor’s usually associate with heart disease. Although chest pain is the most common heart attack symptom in women and men, women can also have a heart attack without having any chest pain; women also often lack the radiating left-arm pain that is commonly associated with heart attacks.

Fatigue, nausea, shoulder and jaw pain, headaches, and muscle spasms are all heart attack symptoms that show up in women much more often than in men; since many of these symptoms can be attributed to stress, heart disease is often overlooked in women.

Heart disease is the number one killer of women in the United States. One of the reasons for it's high death toll is the fact that we are not as familiar with the way women's heart attacks look, because most medical experimenting is done on men (since they can't get pregnant, there is less risk for complications). However, now that the information is out there I find it sad that it's not being better publicised - it's amazing to me that so many people are not being informed of the special symptomes women have, even at events specificallt aimed at women's heart disease prevention (like the one at my school.)

Awareness is one of the biggest steps in terms of lowering the fatality of heart disease in women so, please, do a little research and pass some information on to the women (and men!) that you love. Who knows, your influnce may even save a life  =)

Here's an excellent article by Kate Harding, where I first learned about these symptoms!

If I hadn't already been a feminist, my awakening would have come in September 2000, when my mother lay dying in a hospital. She'd gone in with a massive heart attack, and tests revealed she'd had several smaller ones previously -- something none of us, including Mom, had known about. I asked the doctor how that was possible, and he gave me two answers. First, she had Type 2 diabetes, and diabetic neuropathy can interfere with people's ability to recognize heart attack symptoms. Second, women's heart attack symptoms can be different from men's -- we might feel pain in the back, jaw or stomach instead of the chest, for instance, and the radiating pain down the left arm we all hear about doesn't show up as often in women. Why, I asked the doctor, had I never heard that before, at 25 years old? "Well," he said, "until about 20 years ago, they just didn't test much on women. The assumption was that it would be the same for them as for men."

(Read the rest -- it's amazing!)