Women and Heart Disease

Heart diseases are common among the women population just as is the case in male population. In fact, it is estimated that 8.6 million women succumb to the illness annually in the United States alone. This means that the disease is responsible for a third of all women deaths in the country. Women heart disease is currently affecting eight million women, with 35,000 of these being under 65 years of age. Another four million are angina sufferers.

The prevalence of women heart disease is evident in the 435,000 heart attacks registered annually in the different parts of the country. Statistics indicate that 42 percent of the heart attack suffers die within a year of the attack. This means that women who suffer heart attacks die at a faster rate than men. Statistics in the trend of heart ailments in men indicate that only 24 percent of men die a year after suffering an initial heart attack.

Women heart diseases first presents with mild symptoms which feel like flu to most women. According to health professionals, at least 71 percent of women with heart conditions experience these mild symptoms, which usually manifest as extreme weakness. At this early stage, most women do not have pains in the chest. In fact, health statistics indicate that about two-thirds of heart related deaths occur in women who have never had chest pains before.

Just like in the male population, the most profound women heart disease risk factors include tobacco smoking, abnormal amounts of lipids in the blood and diabetes. Previous researches indicate that women smokers increase their risk by 19 years compared to non smokers. Hypertension, which is common in people using the oral contraceptive, also increases the chance of women developing heart disease. Diabetes on the other hand places women sufferers on twice the risk of suffering from women heart disease when compared to the non-diabetics. More so, diabetes places women at double the risk of repeat heart attacks.

The diagnosis for women heart disease is not as straight forward as is the case with men. This is attributed to the even distribution of plaque in women’s arteries, which passes as normal in angiographic studies. In men however, the plaque clumps in different areas of the artery walls thus leading to easy diagnosis.

However, it is not all doom for women heart disease sufferers. Studies have shown that the female heart is able to respond better to lifestyle changes than does the male heart. As such, women can easily adopt lifestyle changes related preventive measures to keep the disease at bay.