workforce that’s as diverse as the patients seeking the care,” she adds.
So what are the differences between women and men when it comes to the heart?
“Let me just start by saying that up until about 20 years ago, we thought men and women’s hearts were the same. We were just men with periods,” says Miller, a practicing physician with Triune Integrative Medicine in Medford, Ore.
We’ve now learned that “women’s hearts are smaller, our walls are thinner, our blood vessels are smaller. We have a more rapid heart rate than men,” Miller adds.
Women’s bodies also respond differently to stress, Miller notes. Women experience an increase in heart rate, while men tend to have their blood vessels constrict, causing their hearts to pump harder and increasing their risk of high blood pressure.
Because of these physical differences, women tend to suffer different types of heart disease than men, according to experts.
“We don’t generally have the usual coronary artery disease. We have microvascular disease, which is in the smaller blood vessels,” Miller shares. Because of this, the usual heart scans might miss impending disease in women.
Women are also more likely than men to experience a tear in a coronary artery, as well as a weakening of the heart’s main pumping chamber, known as “broken heart syndrome,” Itchhaporia and Miller say.
“Broken heart syndrome is like a stun gun to the heart where there’s a trauma and the heart looks like it’s having a heart attack, but it’s not,” Miller explains. “Generally, people recover. That’s far more likely to happen in women.”
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Heart risk factors also differ
With these differences also come different risk factors for heart disease in women.
Some occur directly from specifically female medical conditions. For example, women can develop