What do women really worry about when it comes to health? In a very informal and completely unscientific study I conducted among women friends, family members, and coworkers, the number one health concern that always surfaced was cancer -- especially breast cancer.
Unfortunately, while understanding and knowing your cancer risk is a good thing, the simple truth is that cancer is not the number one killer of women overall. While some ethnicities fare better than others, heart disease continues to be the number one killer of women in the United States.
All cancers combined come in at second place. Surprisingly, while breast cancer is the most common form of cancer in women, lung cancer causes far more deaths in women -- almost double -- than breast cancer. (Cancer Among Women 1)
Despite the fact that heart disease is the leading cause of death in women overall, not all women share the same level of risk when it comes to heart-disease related death.
Your genetic heritage, that is your ethnicity, also plays a role when it comes to heart disease. Some ethnicities have a higher risk than others when it comes to heart disease.
Consider the following facts from the Centers for Disease Control:
• Heart disease is the number one killer of women in the United States. One in four women dies of heart-related disease in the United States each year. Over all, a death from heart disease occurs every 35 seconds!
• Stroke accounts for another 6.7 percent of all deaths in women annually.
• White women, black women, and women of Hispanic descent have the highest rates of death from heart-related disease at 25.2 percent -- slightly over the national average of 25.1 percent -- for white and black women, and 22.3 percent for Hispanic women.
• Women of American Indian or Native Alaskan descent fare slightly better when it comes to heart disease than do women of other ethnicities, with a death rate of slightly over 17 percent compared to a national average of more than 25 percent overall. Also, the leading cause of death for American Indian and Native Alaskan women is cancer -- 18.8 percent -- and not heart disease. In addition, American Indian and Native Alaskan women have lower rates of death from stroke -- 4.9 percent -- compared to 6.7 percent in women of other ethnicities.
• While they don’t fare as well as American Indian women or women of Native Alaskan descent, Asian women and women from the Pacific Islands also enjoy slightly lower rates of heart disease -- 22 percent -- compared to the national average of 25.1 percent.
However, they do have higher rates of death from stroke -- 9.2 percent -- than the national average. Death from high blood pressure or hypertension accounts for another 1.9 deaths. As with Native Alaskan and American Indian women, cancer is the also the leading cause of the death for this demographic.
Heart disease strikes right at the heart -- no pun intended -- of women and prematurely takes the lives of our mothers, sisters, aunts, cousins, grandmothers, and girlfriends. No longer only a man’s disease, someone in the United States dies from a heart attack every 35 seconds!
One reason that death from heart attack may be so prevalent in women is a failure to recognize heart attack symptoms when they occur. While chest pain, shortness of breath, cold sweats, and pain in the arms, back, neck and jar are common symptoms of a heart attack, women frequently experience symptoms which are very different.
Many women report flu-like symptoms prior to a heart attack. Some simply think they’re having a bad case of acid reflux. Other women may feel short of breath and experience light-headedness, dizziness or fainting.
Still other may feel as if they’ve been working out even though they aren’t exerting themselves. Women are also much more likely to experience nausea or vomiting than men, heartburn, loss of appetite, coughing, fatigue, and heart flutters prior to a heart attack than men.
While ethnicity may improve your risk of dying from a heart attack, it won’t protect you either. If you experience symptoms which might be heart-related, always seek medical attention immediately.
Sources:
Heart Disease in Women. Medline Plus, a Service of U.S. National Library of Medicine. 24 Feb 2012. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/heartdiseaseinwomen.html
Reviewed by Patrice Desvigne-Nickens, M.D. Heart Disease Fact Sheet. Women’s Health.gov, A Project of the U.S. Department of Health and Humans Services Offices on Women’s Health. 02 Feb 2009. http://womenshealth.gov/publications/our-publications/fact-sheet/heart-disease.cfm
Leading Cause of Death in Women. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 31 Oct 2011. http://www.cdc.gov/women/lcod
Cancer Among Women. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 10 Feb 2011. http://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/data/women.htm
Reviewed February 27, 2012
by Michele Blacksberg RN
Edited by Jody Smith