Television doctor Dr Nighar Arif, a women's health specialist who has appeared on the BBC and ITV, has warned that heart attack symptoms in women are "too often" dismissed as something less serious. In a video shared on TikTok, she said women's heart attacks are frequently "dangerously overlooked."
Why women's symptoms are missed
Dr Arif explained that medical training traditionally focused on a dramatic presentation: "We were taught heart attacks look like a man clutching his chest. It's sharp, it's dramatic, it's obvious." However, she noted that in women, the experience is different: "It's quieter, it's easy to dismiss, it's easier to miss."
She highlighted the "red flags" women should recognise, including unexplained breathlessness, persistent nausea, a dull pain spreading to the back, between the shoulder blades, around the shoulders, or the jaw, a sense that something is deeply wrong, and flu-like symptoms. These can be mislabelled as anxiety or stress.
The stark reality for younger women
Dr Arif added that young women are twice as likely as men their age to die in the year after a heart attack, not because their hearts are weaker, but because their symptoms were overlooked or delayed. She urged women: "If something feels off, even if it doesn't look like a heart attack, trust your body."
Dispelling the myth
The British Heart Foundation dismisses the belief that women suffer heart attacks less severely than men. The charity states: "Symptoms can vary from person to person, but there are no symptoms that are more common in women than in men." It warns that misconceptions may delay diagnosis and make poor outcomes more likely, noting that coronary heart disease kills more than twice as many women as breast cancer in the UK each year.
Common warning signs include sudden, persistent chest pain or discomfort that feels like pressure, tightness, or squeezing; pain spreading to either arm, the neck, jaw, back, or stomach; and feeling sick, sweaty, light-headed, or short of breath.
