Heart Disease and Women

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Act in time

Recognizing and treating a heart attack right away dramatically improves a patient's chance for survival. The typical American, however, waits two hours before calling for help.

"Time is heart muscle," says Nieca Goldberg, M.D., chief of the Women's Heart Program at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York and author of Women are Not Small Men: Life-Saving Strategies for Preventing and Healing Heart Disease in Women. "If you get to the hospital during a heart attack, we can administer aggressive clot-busting treatments."

Studies have shown that drugs that dissolve coronary blood clots during a heart attack can reduce the death rate in both men and women, although women have a higher risk of stroke from the therapy. Unfortunately, statistics show that a woman in the midst of having a heart attack receives clot-busting therapy much later than a man would.

"Women coming into the hospital for a heart attack have a higher death rate and higher risk of complications. A premenopausal woman having a heart attack has twice the death rate of a similarly aged man, " says Goldberg.

Know the warning signs and always call 911 within five minutes of the onset of symptoms, advises James Atkins, M.D., program director of emergency medicine education at UT Southwestern Allied Health Sciences School. By acting quickly, a heart attack victim is less likely to experience cardiac arrest (where the heart stops beating).