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Undetected Heart Disease in Women
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As many as 3 million women in the U.S. may have coronary artery disease that does not show up on standard tests. In a long-term study sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute, researchers examined 1,000 women who had chest pain or an abnormal stress test or electrocardiogram but whose arteries looked clear on angiograms (the standard method for detecting such blockage). With more sophisticated tests, 80 percent of these women were found to have diffuse plaque spread evenly throughout the artery wall. Half had abnormal functioning of the very small arteries of the heart.
Large medical centers offer tests to detect these conditions, says C. Noel Bairey Merz, M.D., a cardiologist at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles and chair of the Women and Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation (WISE) study. If women continue to have pain or other symptoms after an angiogram shows their arteries are clear, “they should seek out care at a medical center where they can be properly diagnosed,” Dr. Bairey Merz says. “They should not be discounted or told it’s a false positive or that it’s all in their heads.”
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