8 Sneaky Heart Attack Symptoms Women Might Be Ignoring

Women aren’t men

There’s a big disconnect between what women think a heart attack would feel like—excruciating chest pain—and what it actually does feel like. As Jean McSweeney, RN, PhD, professor and associate dean for research at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences College of Nursing, in Little Rock, Arkansas, points out: “Other than the reproductive system, the cardiovascular system has the most differences between genders.” So it’s to be expected that the symptoms—while sometimes shared with men in a general sense—can also be experienced differently. After all, “we have much smaller vessels in our heart,” says Dr. McSweeney, who was among the first to zero in on women’s heart attack symptoms in a 2003 study, published in the journal Circulation. “And we’re constructed differently.” Here are 9 physical and emotional ways heart disease is different for women.

When a woman’s main arteries are blocked, she’ll often experience a constellation of signs, including chest pain, pressure, or tightness, along with multiple non-chest symptoms, says Judith Hilevi Lichtman, PhD, MPH, department chair and associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health. What’s more, not every woman experiences the same symptoms, and the symptoms don’t necessarily happen all at once. We spoke with experts and women heart-attack survivors about what exactly some of those symptoms might be and what they actually feel like. Here are a few that surprised us most.

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