Like instead of chest pains, they feel “sick” or it feels like a flu without chest pains
In: Biology
This is hard to make it an ELi5 since we don’t know the exact science. Women do not have different heart attack symptoms — just different descriptions of the symptoms. Some people think women have a higher pain threshold but it could be that they’re dismissing the chance of having a heart attack since men are more likely to get one.
Women often describe heart attack as an ache or muscle tightness in the chest region, in the arm, or their left side. Men will say, “It hurts, it’s sharp, it pinches, etc.” But the sensation is the same, just different perceptions. It used to be thought that “because women don’t strenuously load their body with physical work, that they aren’t as familiar with differentiating muscle ache to chest pain” but that doesn’t really explain how men that don’t have physically demanding jobs or routines still say that it’s a sharp pain.
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