Women often have abdominal pain in heart attacks

Women often have abdominal pain in a heart attack.

A heart attack is often discovered too late in women because the symptoms are usually too unspecified. Many women believe in abdominal pain, it is a gastrointestinal or digestive disorder. In contrast to men, women often experience severe upper abdominal pain, dizziness, nausea, and vomiting.

Norbert Smetak, chairman of the Federal Association of Established Cardiologists in Munich, therefore advises women to call an emergency physician for such symptoms. Especially when additional symptoms such as excessive sweating, shortness of breath and anxiety are added. "One possible cause of this increased mortality is that the often atypical symptoms are not always properly interpreted. That's why women are often treated too late or not treated at all. Smetak. But in a heart attack, every minute counts. "The loss of time until the start of effective treatment in the clinic, in turn, worsens the further prognosis." For this reason, it is advisable to call too much rather than too little the emergency doctor. Meanwhile, the heart attack is also the second leading cause of death in women. Also because the disease was recognized too late.

In men, a heart attack usually manifests itself differently. Men are more likely to experience mid-thoracic pain, often radiating to the left arm and lower jaw. The main symptom of myocardial infarction is a sudden, lasting for more than 20 minutes and usually very severe pain in the chest, which can radiate into the shoulders, arms, lower jaw and upper abdomen. (Sb)