Folks Magazine (Amazon/PillPack)
A heart attack can look very different for a woman than it does a man. As a national heart disease spokesperson, Shalini Suryanarayana wants women to know the warning signs.
When it comes to maintaining a healthy lifestyle, Shalini Suryanarayana does everything considered right. She eats a vegetarian diet, drinks alcohol only on occasion, doesn’t smoke, maintains an average weight, keeps active, and exercises regularly. In 2012 she was running a couple of miles every day, in training for a team event to raise money for breast cancer.
But when she was struck by a cardiac event that same year at the age of 47, the University of Vermont program director got many things wrong.
“I just wasn’t thinking very straight,” Suryanarayana says.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in both men and women in the U.S., accounting for approximately one in four deaths nationwide. It can affect people of all ages and ethnicities and can strike with no warning and none of the associated risk factors like smoking, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, or depression.
But unlike the chest-clutching pain and squeezing sensation commonly associated with heart attack and cardiac events, symptoms in women can be much more subtle and diverse, sometimes manifesting as a shortness of breath, indigestion, back or jaw pain, fatigue, nausea, sweating, lightheadedness — all common symptoms a woman might easily attribute to more mundane conditions like menstruation, menopause, the flu, or just everyday stress.
In fact, to say a cardiac event “struck” would be an overstatement in many cases. Despite the life-threatening ramifications, cardiac events in women like Suryanarayana can more closely resemble a series of sudden but trivial discomforts. . . .
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