Are Heart Attacks More Deadly for Women?

Age or Illness May Cause the Gender Gap in Heart Attack Survival Rates, Study Shows

By LAUREN COX and COURTNEY HUTCHINSON
ABC News Medical Unit

Doctors have long known that women are nearly twice as likely as men to die in the first month after a heart attack. But a new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association looked behind this statistic to discover that gender may not directly influence survival outcomes after a heart attack heart attack outcomes.

A new study found women are more likely to die than men in the first month a serious heart attack, but the difference may lie in women's age and health at the time of the heart attack, not in the difference between the sexes.

(ABC News Photo Illustration)

Theresa Volpe, 40, barely survived a massive heart attack two years ago. She said despite ongoing symptoms of dizziness and fatigue, when her chest pains struck, many people thought she had indigestion.

"I was so dizzy and light headed -- my arms felt heavy and weighed down," said Volpe. "The paramedics came and looked me over and said, well your heart rate is not so high maybe it's just anxiety."

But once a cardiologist saw her, she was immediately airlifted to a specialist center where it was discovered one of Volpe's major arteries was 90 percent blocked by plaque.

"I was lucky because a lot of women don't survive a heart attack," said Volpe, who is now a spokeswoman for the Go Red for Women campaign of the American Heart Association.

Investigating Why Women and Men's Heart Attacks Differ

To discover more about the difference in heart attack survival rates between the sexes, Dr. Jeffrey Berger and his colleagues at the New York University School of Medicine analyzed the medical records of more than 130,000 heart attack patients (72 percent men and 28 percent women) that were part of 11 international studies between 1993 and 2006. Read more...