MORE NEWS FOR THE FEMALE GENDER: HEART ATTACKS IN FEMALES

As I was reading, I cam across this article, on females and heart attacks. Dr canto, from the Watson Clinic and Lakeland Regional medical Center, published their findings in the Journal of the American Medical association, 22nd Feb 2012. They examined the National registry of Myocardial Infarction from 1994 -2006. All in all, in the registry, there were 1,143,513 heart attacks. They compiled the numbers and this is how it turned out.

Results ( tabulated summary ) from Dr Canto’s study

	Females	Males
Age at presentation	74yrs	67yrs
Presenting without chest pains	42%	30%
In hospital mortality	14.6%	10.3%

What this would mean would be that, females tend to present later. Maybe they do not have the typical chest pains symptoms. More of them do not have typical chest pains and that more of them die, maybe because their presentation was missed upon admission, so that the diagnosis is delayed, or that they are more sick, by the time they present. It is certainly interesting to postulate on the reasons why. Is Heart attack a sexist disease. If not the disease itself, the caregiver bias?

I suppose this article teaches me that I must have a high index of suspicions when females with important risk factors present to me, and I must make sure that I take a good history and do an ECG, if not also the cardiac enzymes.