If you can listen to your body and learn to recognize the warning signals it’s sending you, you can significantly reduce the chance of getting a heart attack.
Interestingly, men and women have completely different symptoms of heart disease, and in women these sometimes appear even 30 days before it comes to acute myocardial infarction.
These are the symptoms that you mustn’t ignore and ask for an urgent appointment with a cardiologist.
- Constant fatigue or insomnia
If you’ve been feeling more tired than usual for some time, even when you’re not doing anything strenuous, it can be a warning that your coronary arteries have seriously narrowed. Decreased blood supply to the heart muscle inhibits your heart’s ability to pump blood, which makes you feel exhausted and worn out. It’s the same reason why you can’t fall asleep at night.
- Shortness of breath
Women who find it difficult to breath are at a serious risk of heart attack. The thing is that the respiratory and cardiovascular systems are mutually dependent. So, when your heart receives less blood, your lungs get less oxygen, which results in dyspnea, or shortness of breath.
- Muscle weakness
As your entire body suffers from lack of oxygen, decreased blood flow affects all body functions. Blood circulation is getting worse preventing your muscles to work normally.
- Dizziness, nausea and sweating
If you have an inexplicable attack of vertigo, or you are bathed in cold sweat, it is quite possible that you are in a pre-cardiac-arrest condition. This symptom frequently appears when a person suddenly rises because your blood does not reach your brain in time.
- Uncomfortable feeling in your chest
The narrower the coronary artery gets, the less blood passes through, which triggers tightness in your chest, which gradually turns into pain.
HERE’S WHAT YOU SHOULD DO
Given that women usually experience milder symptoms, which can easily be ignored and dismissed as irrelevant until it is too late, it is crucial to listen to your body and never ignore these signs.
It is a must that you visit a doctor, who should take your blood pressure and do an ECG test along with a blood test, stress test, and ultrasound of the heart and lungs. If there are serious indications that something is wrong, you will be sent for an angiography.
What’s most important in this case, especially if you have a family history of heart disease and feel that something unusual is happening to your body, is that you insist on doing at least some of these tests.
