Women, heart health & naps

“What if someone told you that the best thing you could do for your heart would be to eat a home-cooked meal and take a nap?
This may well not be the best medicine for every woman, but it is possible, that when we overwork and put our lives in overdrive, in our quest to have it all, we might be risking heart health.
Heart disease is the leading cause of premature death for women. There can be major differences in symptoms and associated factors between heart disease in women and heart disease in men, and we are only just beginning to understand women’s heart health.
In her book ‘Women are not small men’, Dr Nieca Goldberg explains how symptoms of a heart attack differ greatly between men and women. Whereas men suffer from the ‘classic’ symptoms of a gripping feeling in the chest, sweating and radiating pain down the left arm, women may not suffer from any of these symptoms when they experience heart attacks. Typical symptoms that women experience can be debilitating fatigue that doesn’t go away with sleep, nausea, shortness of breath and tightness and pain in the back arms jaw or neck. Often the associated pain is lower than it is in men and is mistaken for indigestion, especially since the ‘classic’ symptoms that most people think of, including many (doctors) are simply classic for men. Not women...
...Perhaps it is not surprising that the symptoms we experience are different, as there are significant differences in the causes of heart attacks between the sexes... In 2006...a study found that whereas about three quarters of men with heart symptoms suffer from blocked arteries, only about a third of women do... women can be more likely to have clear coronary arteries but have micro-vascular disease, where there is a constriction or stiffening of the smaller arteries that nourish the heart, leading to oxygen deprivation to the heart muscle...”

The article continues to discuss the differences between women and men, and the current state of knowledge, diagnosis and treatment in Western medicine, and examines the different approach adopted by taking an oriental medical perspective. It then continues to make recommendations for reducing the risk of heart disease in women.

The article is written by Dr Claudia Welch, who is a doctor of oriental medicine, a practitioner of Ayurvedic medicine and an author on Eastern medicine and philosophy.