Pre-heart attack symptoms often dismissed when patient is a woman

Understand the sytomps and risk factors for a heart attack. (Dreamstime) Understand the sytomps and risk factors for a heart attack. (Dreamstime) Photo: Dreamstime, TNS Photo: Dreamstime, TNS Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Pre-heart attack symptoms often dismissed when patient is a woman 1 / 3 Back to Gallery

Women's symptoms of a heart attack are more often dismissed by doctors than men's, leading to potential complications and sometimes death, medical research has found.

While the predominant symptom of a heart attack for both is severe chest pain, women tend to have additional warning signs such as indigestion, shortness of breath or pain in the jaw, neck or arms. But it is those clues that often get dismissed as unrelated to their heart, a study from Yale University's School of Public Health showed.

The research looked at the cases of 2,009 women and 979 men, between the ages of 18 and 55, who were hospitalized across the United States after suffering a heart attack between August 2009 and January 2012. The findings were published Monday online in Circulation, the medical journal of the American Heart Association.

About 30 percent of the women said they had sought prior medical treatment leading up to their heart attack, compared with only 22 percent of men.

RELATED: New $10M effort to improve health by improving neighborhoods

But of those more than half -- 53 percent -- said their doctor did not think their symptoms were related to their heart. That compares to 37 percent of men.

"From my perspective, this represents a missed opportunity to identify symptoms of heart disease," Judith Lichtman, associate professor at Yale's chronic disease epidemiology department and lead author of the study, told CNN.

RELATED: Gender gap in heart attack care is bad for women

It is especially troubling when stacked against other research that showed the death rate of women who suffered in-hospital heart attacks was nearly double that of men. The death rate of women was 2.3 percent to 3.3 percent compared to 1.8 to about 2 percent of men.