Category: Women and heart attacks

– posts here focus on warning signs and symptoms women experience during a cardiac event

How intense grief increases your cardiac risk

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 18 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

Emelyn_Story_Tomba_(Cimitero_Acattolico_Roma)My Dad died young in 1983, at just 62 years of age. His was the first significantly meaningful death I’d ever been exposed to, and my personal introduction to the concept of grief and bereavement in our family. My father died of metastatic cancer, lying in a general med-surg hospital ward bed, misdiagnosed with pneumonia until five days before his death, cared for (and I use those two words charitably) by a physician who was so profoundly ignorant about end-of-life care that he actually said these words to my distraught mother, with a straight face:

“We are reluctant to give him opioids for pain because they are addictive.”

This pronouncement was made on the morning of the same day my father died. But hey! – at least Dad wasn’t an addict when he took his last breath nine hours later.    Continue reading “How intense grief increases your cardiac risk” →

Why you should hug your cardiologist today

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 20 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥  @HeartSisters

hugI like to tell my women’s heart health presentation audiences that, if you’re going to have a heart attack, you should really try to have one here in Victoria, British Columbia – or in any other city that boasts a healthy ratio of cardiologists-per-square-city-block.

My theory on this is that cardiologists, just like the rest of us, want to raise their families in a charming historic town with good schools, good restaurants, good shopping, fun night life, live theatre, sports teams, 200 km of cycling trails, a symphony orchestra, picture-postcard ocean/forest/mountain scenery, and a near-perfect coastal climate allowing them to garden or play golf 12 months a year. If this town also has a major university and a good-sized teaching hospital that attracts both students and cardiac researchers, that’s also going to go a long way in appealing to cardiologists.  You’re welcome, Tourism Victoria . . . Continue reading “Why you should hug your cardiologist today” →

How having a wife shortens time to heart attack care

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 15 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas    ♥  @HeartSisters

Help-by-LiminalMikeHere’s a news flash from the Department of the Bleedin’ Obvious . . .  Medical researchers tell us that married men suffering heart attack chest pain get to the hospital far quicker than single men do.  In my admittedly non-scientific opinion, this reality is entirely due to the fact that these married men have wives.

As Dr. Ralph Brindis, past president of the American College of Cardiology, once told a Wall Street Journal interviewer: 

“Thank God we have spouses. I can’t tell you how often, if it was left up to the patient, they never would have sought care.” 

According to one study, for example, a Canadian research team out of Toronto’s Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences found that the odds of men showing up at the hospital more than six hours after the onset of cardiac chest pain were a relative 65% lower in men who had spouses compared to their single male counterparts. (1)

In a spectacularly understated explanation for these findings, researchers reported in the Canadian Medical Association Journal:

“We surmise that, in general, women may be more likely than men to take the role of caregiver and to advise their spouses to seek early medical assessment.”

This early medical assessment during a heart attack is crucially important, because we know that half of the deaths from a heart attack occur in the first 3-4 hours after cardiac symptoms begin. Now here’s the interesting – and utterly maddening – part of this surmising from the Canadian study: a similar association was not seen in married women.  In other words, being married did not mean that women were more likely than their single peers to seek faster help in mid-heart attack. Continue reading “How having a wife shortens time to heart attack care” →

When your “significant EKG changes” are missed

~ Carolyn Thomas ~ 25 Comments

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

A new cardiac study out of Montréal tells us yet again what women heart patients have already known for years: women receive poorer care during a heart attack than our male counterparts do. Quelle surprise . . .  But one specific finding caught my eye: one of the cardiac procedures that these researchers compared in this study was the use of the diagnostic electrocardiogram test (ECG or EKG) in male and female heart attack patients.(1)

They found that women were less likely than men to receive an electrocardiogram within the recommended 10 minutes of arriving in hospital with suspected cardiac symptoms.

It turns out, however, that even when we do finally get hooked up to a 12-lead EKG in a hospital’s Emergency Department, the doctors there may not be able to correctly interpret the “significant EKG changes” that identify heart disease. Continue reading “When your “significant EKG changes” are missed” →