Minding your heart one beat at a time

ALONG with baldness, prostates and nose hair, heart attacks are usually thrown into the boys’ bag when it comes to health and things like breast cancer, menopause and all things ‘womby’ get packed for the girls.

Yes, there are plenty of health issues that are pretty gender neutral but watching out for darting pains down an arm, feeling as if an elephant has plonked on your chest and the fat-laden Irish breakfast are all risks of heart attacks that we usually assign to men – and that’s where we’re going wrong.
The science shows that men and women are equally affected when it comes to heart disease and in fact, the risks of cardiac trouble can be even greater for women as they grow older.
Unfortunately, because women display different symptoms and their risk is delayed by about ten years due to the menopause, a lot of heart disease in women goes undiagnosed, according to Irene Gibson at Croi’s Centre for Heart and Stroke Health in Galway.
Nearly 40 per cent of heart attacks in women will present without any chest pain; women’s symptoms are atypical and we need to start paying better attention to what our bodies tell us as we grow older. Sometimes there’s something quite serious behind simply feeling tired all the time.

Read the full feature in this week's edition of The Tuam Herald