At what age do women get heart attacks?
Heart attacks occur mainly at an advanced age. The heart attack risk is increased with women from the age of 50. Particularly in the age group between 65 and 75 years the heart attack risk is strongly increased.
Furthermore many different factors can cause an earlier occurrence of a heart attack. First of all, attention should be paid to the family history (heart attack in mother/grandmother/sister). Diabetes mellitus (“diabetes”), coronary heart disease, atherosclerosis and an imbalance in blood lipids can also cause a heart attack at a young age.
Symptoms
Along with stroke, heart attack is the most common cause of death in the industrialized countries of the world – for both women and men. The leading symptoms of a heart attack are therefore widely known to most people. The most typical symptom is the already mentioned angina pectoris (chest tightness), which is accompanied by sudden pain behind the breastbone and can radiate into the left arm, neck, lower jaw, back and upper abdomen.
The pain is often perceived as very threatening and can trigger fear of death. In technical jargon it is therefore also called pain of destruction. These often radiate into the surrounding body regions.
The back also belongs to this. Particularly in the area between the shoulder blades, pain during a heart attack or as a harbinger of one is often described. Less well known, however, is the fact that up to 20% of all heart attacks are asymptomatic, i.e. without symptoms.
The character of the pain can also vary greatly from individual to individual. It should be noted that heart attacks in women often cause a kind of feeling of pressure and tightness in the chest compared to men. However, pulling in the left breast is not untypical, but can have various causes, especially in women.
In women, unspecific symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and shortness of breath also occur more frequently. Other possible complaints are cold sweat, dizziness and an accelerated, but in some cases also slowed heartbeat. Especially a simultaneous occurrence of several of these symptoms is suspicious.The heart attack in women very often triggers rather unspecific warning signs of an infarction and can easily misdiagnose doctors.
Unexplained back pain or upper abdominal pain are thus unfortunately sometimes assigned to a heart attack too late. If symptoms such as back pain, cold sweat, shortness of breath and nausea suddenly appear in combination with each other, a heart attack should always be considered. You can find further information here: Symptoms of a heart attackThe typical pressing or stabbing pain of a heart attack is often not perceived in women.
Instead, it radiates into the back between the shoulder blades. The nerves that transmit this pain stimulus to the brain are connected to other nerve plexuses on the way there. This interconnection means that the brain cannot always determine exactly where the pain is coming from.
At the level of the spinal cord, there is a junction between the nerve that comes from the heart and the one that comes from the region between the shoulder blades. The brain therefore confuses the place of origin of the pain and thinks that it is back pain. Due to the lack of supply of nutrients to the heart, sometimes very severe pain occurs during a heart attack, which also presents itself as a burning or stinging sensation.
Similar to back pain, arm pain is also caused by a joint interconnection of the pain-conducting nerves. One of the nerves that are interconnected in the same plexus is the one that carries pain signals from the left arm to the brain. For this reason, pain is often not only felt in the chest area, but the feeling radiates into the left arm.
A heart attack in women is particularly often accompanied by the symptoms of shortness of breath and shortness of breath. On the one hand, the shortness of breath can be explained by the sudden onset of pain and the feeling of tightness in the chest. On the other hand, the body is put into a state of emergency at that moment, which means that it consumes and would have to take in much more oxygen.
A heart attack is caused by a lack of blood supply to the heart muscle cells. Often the lack of oxygen is the biggest problem, so the body tries to compensate for the deficiency by increasing oxygen uptake with breathing, resulting in shortness of breath and shortness of breath. Especially in women, nausea, vomiting and stomach pain are common symptoms of a heart attack or a reduced supply of oxygen to the heart muscles.
This can also be accompanied by diarrhoea. Poor cardiac performance due to the heart attack also plays a role. Due to the weakness of the heart, not enough blood is pumped to all body organs.
It is possible that the supply of blood to the stomach and the various sections of the intestine is reduced. As a result, the regular digestive processes can no longer take their usual course, which can cause diarrhoea. The high blood pressure during a heart attack may seem paradoxical at first, because the performance of the heart is classically reduced during a heart attack.
This should normally also lead to low blood pressure. However, there are several mechanisms that can cause high blood pressure at the beginning of the infarction. First of all, the heart tries to compensate for its lack of performance by pumping harder.
This can lead to high blood pressure. In addition, in the event of a heart attack, the sympathetic nervous system (the body’s active alarm system, so to speak) is activated. This leads to an accelerated heartbeat and to an increased beating power of the heart muscle.
Through this mechanism, a higher blood pressure is generated for a short time. However, this state only lasts for a short time, after which all the reserves of the heart are exhausted and the blood pressure drops rapidly. Heartburn occurs when acid from the stomach flows back into the esophagus through a leak.
Stomach acid is particularly acidic with a pH value of 2-3 and immediately attacks the mucous membrane inside the esophagus. This leads to burning pain behind the breastbone, which is particularly severe when lying down and after meals. A heart attack can also cause burning pain in the chest area, which is why the symptom is often confused with heartburn. Furthermore, more blood flows back into the heart when lying down, so that this larger amount of blood must be managed by the heart. This may explain why the burning sensation also occurs more often when lying down during a heart attack.
