Tough Women Study

Tough Women Study

It’s an often talked about aspect of the battle of the sexes: which gender can handle pain better? A new study shows women--at one time considered the weaker sex--are actually stronger. But that may not be such a good thing, especially given the fact that still don’t understand that heart disease is the number one killer of woman over the age of sixty-five, and they ignore the warning signs of heart problems.

64 year old Jane here is like a lot of women when they get pain. They just tough it out. "I had the knot and I was exercising, I said oh I could walk this out, and I always walked it out, so I didn’t think anything about it because I was able to solve it," says Jane.

But about a month later, after telling her doctor what happened, she had a stress test. "Immediately the stress test was abnormal and in a week I was operated on and I had six bypasses. So I was tough and that really didn’t help me, did it, and I was thinking about it, if it happened to my husband for example I was observing this, I would have had him to the doctor," Jane recalls.

And that women might be tougher when it comes to tolerating discomfort may be part of the reason for the disparity in care when it comes to heart disease. A new study in the latest American Journal of Medicine looked at 490 heart patients treated at the University of Michigan for heart attack or severe heart pain. In all, the 142 women and 348 men rated the severity of their heart disease about the same. But in fact, the women had much worse disease, took many more medicines, and experienced more serious symptoms and limitations on their daily lives.

Dr. Alison Schecter, Director of the Women’s Care Program at Mt. Sinai Medical Center, says, "Women may be tougher in some ways, they may complain a little less, but more likely it’s just that they just don’t perceive as heart disease on their radar screen as much as breast cancer and other disease processes which have been more publicized." Previous studies have shown that women are more likely to delay seeking help for heart-related symptoms than men, and are less likely to receive heart-related diagnostic and therapeutic procedures.

Dr. Schecter states, "Woman often take care of their spouse, they take care of the children, they often take care of the elderly parents so it often times occurs woman don’t often pay attention as much to their own symptoms and might pass some of these symptoms which might be more subtle. Women need to be aware that heart disease is the number one killer of woman above the age of sixty-five and that if you have symptoms you need to aggressively seek medical attention."

According to u.s. government statistics, more women than men die of heart disease each year, yet women receive only: • 33% of angioplasties, stents and bypass surgeries. • 28% of inplantable defibrillators. • 36% of open-heart surgeries. Heart disease is the leading cause of death of American women; it kills one out of three.