Women urged to prioritise heart health

Seventy-one-year-old Deidre Finn likes to keep active.

She works full time, enjoys walking her two dogs, and loves spending time with her husband and their family.

Apart from a fibromyalgia diagnosis some years ago, Deidre said she was usually healthy.

But a few months ago, she began feeling unusually lethargic.

“I’d been feeling tired for some weeks, even months. My neck had been feeling stiff and swollen, so, I went to the doctor,” Deidre said. “But we didn’t think it was my heart. I thought it could have been mumps or my age.

“Then, later that week at home, I had this sudden pain from the top of my head to my chest, and down both arms to my fingertips. It was like, all of a sudden, I was lit up. Like, every nerve was unhappy.

“It was weird. Like an electric shock. I said to my husband, ‘Do you think it could be a heart attack?’, and neither of us thought it was, but he took me straight to Caboolture Hospital.”

When she arrived at the hospital, Deidre said doctors couldn’t believe she had walked in by herself. Three of her arteries were blocked, one, dangerously high.

I had a 90 per cent blockage in one of my arteries. I was having a heart attack.

Busting the myth that heart attacks are a “man’s disease”

Almost every hour of every day an Australian woman dies of heart disease, according to the Heart Foundation.

On average that equates to 20 women a day.

Heart disease in women can occur at any age but the risk changes with age.

With her father, grandfather and great grandfather all suffering heart attacks, like many, Deidre thought heart attacks were a “man’s disease”.

“I don’t know why I had always associated heart attacks with men, but maybe that’s the general view out there,” she said.

“Lying in that bed, with all these people around you, it felt like they were talking about someone else. Even at that point, I thought, it can’t be me.”

“When I looked at my poor husband and his face was ashen, that’s when I realised it was me.

“It’s not something that’s regularly discussed for women and I think more doctors need to pay heed to that and discuss heart health more with their female patients,” she said.

Dr Amy Bailey (pictured below) agrees. As an Interventional Cardiologist at the Sunshine Coast University Hospital, Dr Bailey said although the most common symptoms for both men and women can present as chest pain, quite often, it’s feeling “funny” or unusual, that could be a dangerous precursor to heart attacks in women.

“Most women who have a heart attack still present with chest symptoms, but women are far less likely to use the word ‘pain’, instead they often use other descriptive words like ‘heaviness’, ‘tightness’, ‘pressure’,” Dr Bailey said.

“Women don’t think of it as pain, whereas men just say, ‘I’ve got chest pain’.

“Although most women present with chest pain, there are a larger proportion of women than men who present with atypical symptoms.

“We see everything from just feeling breathless, sweaty, pain in the arms, pain in the back, just feeling like something bad is about to happen and they’re just not right.

“That happens occasionally in men, but it is more likely to happen in women.”

Heart attacks not uncommon in young and healthy women

While Deidre suffered what’s called a “classical heart attack”, where there is cholesterol plaque in the heart’s arteries, Dr Bailey said there were two other kinds of heart attacks that affect a significantly higher proportion of women than men.

“There are two heart conditions where 95 per cent of all cases are women; SCADs and Broken Heart Syndrome,” she said.

Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection or “SCAD” is when a tear suddenly occurs within the layers of one or more of the coronary arteries, and can affect women as young as 30 or 40.

Then there’s Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy or stress cardiomyopathy, also known as broken heart syndrome, a condition that causes a temporary weakening of the heart muscle. Women who suffer broken heart syndrome are usually older and there’s often a stress-triggered event.

According to the SCAD Research Inc, SCAD is responsible for 35 per cent of heart attacks in women under 50.

Ninety per cent of all SCAD cases occur in women, with around 30 per cent of patients likely to experience another SCAD within a 10-year follow-up period.

While treatment options depend on the severity of the condition and the patient’s overall health, Dr Bailey said the key was catching it early.

“We would much rather see people in the ED and do the testing, which doesn’t take very long, than you putting up with the symptoms for even a few hours,” she said.

You don’t want to come in later only to find that was a heart attack and now there’s less heart muscle that we can save.

Kriste Jolliffe (pictured below) was just 44-years-old when she had had her first SCAD while refereeing a soccer training session with her daughter.

“I was on the field when I felt my jaw and throat go really tense. I just put it down to a very stressful day,” she said.

“But then I felt nauseous and happened to be sitting next to a lady who was a qualified nurse who said I was having all the symptoms of a heart attack.

“I couldn’t imagine it was a heart attack, but when I started having pain in my chest, we called an ambulance, and it was a SCAD.”

Three years later, Kriste would suffer her second SCAD but, this time, she knew the symptoms to look out for and raised the alarm.

“It still feels unbelievable. People look at you like, ‘why would you have a heart attack?’,” she said.

Kriste said the key to her diagnosis was taking a troponin test, which measures the troponin protein that's found in the cells of the heart muscle.

When a heart muscle is damaged, troponin leaks into the bloodstream, and the troponin blood levels will rise.

“Because you wouldn’t think someone my age or with my level of fitness can have a heart attack, or because my symptoms look mild, I knew to ask for a troponin test and, sure enough, it was a SCAD.

“It’s not a bacon-eating heart attack. It really can happen to anyone.”

Doctors warn “funny” symptoms could turn deadly

“It may sound strange but, if you’re ‘feeling funny’, you should take it seriously,” Dr Baily said.

“Chest pains and related symptoms are some of the more common presentations to EDs, but we do see people who have not come in sooner because they did not recognise other signs.

“The trouble is women tend to present later because they don’t take their symptoms seriously. But even when they do, their symptoms are either dismissed or not considered to be coming from their heart because they can be considered a lower risk than men.”

Dr Bailey said both healthcare professionals and women played a crucial role in the early detection and timely intervention in women’s heart health.

“Even when women are identified as having had a heart attack, they are less likely to have angiograms, less likely to end up with stents and less likely to be referred to cardiac rehab, and that’s in patients with a diagnosed heart attack,” she said.

“Women are often putting themselves last in all aspects of life, and think, ‘Oh, I can just carry on. It’s not that bad’

There are preventative therapies out there, and it could save your life.

After being discharged from hospital earlier this month, Deidre (below) said she’s now focused on making a full recovery.

“I want to tell people, yes, you can survive it,” she said.

“You must do your best to get back to where you were. You’ve got to set a goal for yourself because, if you don’t, you won’t make it.”

For more information on Heart Health, go to: Heart Foundation.