Standard Heart Attack Testing Doesn't Always Work for Women

Now they tell us. (As if anything "always" works.)

...Anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 women every year with arteries that show up as clear on an angiogram suffer from a heart attack. Thirty-eight percent of the time, like Brown, they have the kind of plaque that doesn't show up on an angiogram, according to new research from the Cardiac and Vascular Institute at New York University Langone Medical Center. In these women, a rupture or ulcer in the plaque of their coronary arteries is behind their heart attack, but this rupture would not show up in standard angiogram.

"When a woman comes in with heart attack symptoms, but the angiogram is clear, doctors will sometimes turn around and tell them they didn't have a heart attack at all," says l Dr. Harmony Reynolds, the lead author of the study and an associate director of the Cardiovascular Clinical Research Center. "This is a big deal, because these patients are not getting the medication they need."

Oops.

Better to be fit than sick and misdiagnosed.