According to a new study, women have a tendency to wait way longer than men to get treatment for their heart attacks, despite the fact heart disease is the number-one killer of both sexes.

When researchers looked at what happened when 1,100 patients (mostly Canadian) were booked into the hospital for heart troubles, they found that:
Only 29 per cent of women received an electrocardiogram in less than 10 minutes, whereas nearly 40 per cent of men did. Similarly, only 32 per cent of women received clot-busting drugs in less than 30 minutes, while about 60 per cent of men did.
But it's not necessarily due to outright discrimination or even unconscious bias on the part of doctors and hospital staff. It's more likely due to our stereotypical idea of what a heart attack looks like since men and women tend to show different symptoms.

Stereotypical emergency heart attack symptoms usually involve things like pain radiating down your left arm and a heavy weight sitting on your chest. While those symptoms are more universal with male patients, women more often experience symptoms like dizziness, extreme shortness of breath, upper back pressure or what feels like acid reflux. This could explain why it takes longer for everyone involved to realize what's happening.

[Globe and Mail]