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Health Check: Why are women slow to get treatment for heart attacks?

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2019/03/06 GMT

Why are women slow to get treatment for heart attacks?

BBC World Service - Health Check, Why are women slow to get treatment for heart attacks?

New research from Poland which finds women take longer to ask for, and get help, than men

Why Polish women take longer than men to get help for heart attacks; Tackling measles in the NYC Jewish community; How press-ups might be a good test of cardiovascular health

New research from Poland has found that women take longer than men to ask for help when they have had a heart attack, and ambulance staff are slower to suspect that women might have had a heart attack in the first place. Young women in particular were delayed in getting treatment. Dr Marek Gierlotka, head of the Cardiology Department at the University of Opole in Poland, was lead author of the research, which was presented this week at the Acute Cardiovascular Care 2019, a European Society of Cardiology (ESC) conference.

New York City is experiencing the biggest measles outbreak it has had in decades.  Fears about vaccine safety, has caused vaccination rates across the United States to drop; the city joins places like Washington State that are seeing measles rates surge. Since last October, 121 people, the vast majority of which are children under 18, have been infected with measles in NYC. Normally that number would be just five or six.  The epicentre of the outbreak is in the Orthodox Jewish communities of Brooklyn. While most children are vaccinated by the time they go to school, there are much lower rates of vaccination among very young children, making them vulnerable to the virus and allowing measles to spread. To combat it, the city and the community are mobilising, as the BBC’s Kizzy Cox reports. 

New research has found that the number of press-ups a man can do is a better indicator of his risk of cardiovascular disease than a running test on a treadmill. But why should press ups be a good test of someone’s risk of developing heart disease?  For his study Stefanos Kales, who is Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts, tested more than a thousand male firefighters over a period of ten years, and the results were not quite what he expected.  They have just been published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.


(Photo caption: Woman suffering from chest pain - credit: Getty Images)


Health Check was presented by Claudia Hammond with comments from Dr Ayan Panja


Producer: Helena Selby

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