World Women's Day: Women, listen to your heart!
March 8 is International Women’s Day and marks an important date for women’s rights worldwide. This important awareness day was established more than 100 years ago, in 1908, by the Socialist Party of America. In 1977, the United Nations declared March 8 as the “United Nations Day for women’s rights and world peace”. And sometime later, this rather cumbersome event simply became the “International Women’s Day”.
But no matter which term is used, the underlying idea behind it is always stays the same: that women should have equal rights to men. Even though this notion seems quite logical, unfortunately reality still looks quite different.
Although there has been great progress and many achievements for equal rights, the sad fact remains that women in many countries of the world still have to fight for very fundamental rights. This includes education, the freedom of expression and even extends to medical care, which is often inadequate. One particular area of inequality in many countries is when it comes to how much women are paid compared to men and the discussion regarding quotas of women in management positions. Also, regarding the household, most of the work is still distributed according to “traditional” gender roles.
Even when it comes to health topics, we also find some inequalities: disease symptoms are often based on the male physiology, even though women experience the same disease with very different symptoms. In the worst-case scenario, this means that women don’t receive a diagnosis in time, or they might even get the wrong diagnosis.
If we take heart attack diagnosis as an example, we see that heart disease is still regarded as a “male disease” even though the mortality rates hardly differ between male and female patients. In fact, heart disease is often even more fatal for women than for men.
The differences between men and women suffering from heart attacks have to do with the onset of symptoms. While classic symptoms, such as chest pain occur for both genders, in women a heart attack often manifests itself as back or neck pain, nausea, vomiting, jaw pain, sore throat or pain in the upper abdomen. Moreover, the harbingers of a heart attack in women can also be prolonged fatigue, sleep disorders, shortness of breath, digestive disorders, numbness in the arms and pain in the back or legs.
However, since the diagnosis is still based on men and their symptoms, heart attacks are often diagnosed too late in women. Therefore, regular monitoring of symptoms is particularly important for women in order to reduce their risk of a heart attack.
One method of prevention, which also supports your health, and can detect recurring symptoms at an early stage is taking ECG readings on a regular basis. A mobile ECG device such as CardioSecur Active can help you to check the health of your heart quickly and easily with your smartphone.
After all, early detection is still the best way to prevent serious heart diseases and helps your heart to remain active and healthy for a long time to come!
If you would like to know more on this topic: how heart attacks affect women differently, which risk factors one should keep in mind and why time is an extremely important factor in all of this, we recommend you read our specialty article “Heart Attacks Among Women”.
