Physicians focus on heart disease in women

When Ruth Jones had a heart attack in late March, she broke out in a cold sweat and was overwhelmed by nausea. Her symptoms are not usually associated with a heart attack, so she went about her usual routine.

A few days later she was gasping for breath. She went to the hospital and was diagnosed immediately.

"I didn't even associate it with a heart attack," she said.

For women like Jones, a 57-year-old tax adviser for the Department of Taxation, heart-attack symptoms are different than men, who have the classic chest pressure.

Most cardiac studies have been conducted on men, even though the disease is the No. 1 killer of both women and men nationwide. To correct this gap, national researchers are focusing on women and heart disease, and local health-care providers are educating women.

Terry Hinners, a cardiac rehab nurse, is helping to compensate for years of medical oversight by teaching classes at the Cardiac Rehab center on women and heart disease.

"Women in the past haven't been studied as men in the same way," she said Monday. "Studies have been more on men and heart disease."

One in every 2.5 women will die of heart disease or stroke, Hinners said, that's nearly 500,000 women a year in the United States.

Studies are showing women have atypical symptoms, such as: nausea, unexplained fatigue, back pain, abdominal pain, pain or numbness in the arms and shortness of breath.

Jones had many of those symptoms. She had a quadruple bypass March 21. She returned to work last Wednesday and has been working hard to stay fit and eat well.

"Women have a higher incidence of dying from the first heart attack than men," Hinners said.

There are several reasons for that, she said. Women tend to be older than men when they have a heart attack. Physicians often misdiagnose it as gastrointestinal problems.

"And it's all going back to that the studies are all done on men and our bodies are just different," said Karen Raleigh, a Cardiac Rehab lead technician for Carson Tahoe Regional Healthcare.

Around the country, hospitals are focusing on heart disease in women. At the Women's Heart Program at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, a medical team is treating a type of heart disease that is commonly undiagnosed because it is missed by the conventional methods, such as exercise stress test, electrocardiograms and echocardiograms.

Microvascular cardiac disease affects the small arteries in the heart. It reduces their ability to maintain the oxygen needed by the heart muscle to function properly. The conventional methods test for dysfunction in the large arteries.

The new pharmacological stress test will help lead researchers to develop more effective ways to treat this disease, which occurs about four times as often in women as in men, according to Cedars-Sinai Medical center.

• Contact reporter Becky Bosshart at bbosshart@nevadaappeal.com or 881-1212.