Even though heart attacks during pregnancy are rare, a study has found that they can be fatal for about 7 percent of women who have them, which is three times higher than what would be expected in non-pregnant women the same age. I must say that after hearing this, I'm certainly happy I'm done being pregnant.
If you're like me, you probably didn't know that heart attacks affect about one in every 16,000 deliveries and that they happen mostly in the last trimester or in the first few weeks after delivery, according to Uri Elkayam, the lead author of the study, which was presented at the annual meeting of the American College of Cardiology this weekned.
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The scariest thing for me is that because these heart attacks are so uncommon in pregnant women, most hospitals don't really know how to deal with them. In other words, doctors don't haven't dealt with enough of them to truly understand which treatments are better or more successful.
Plus, heart attacks during and after pregnancy originated differently than typical heart attacks, making it harder to treat them, according to Elkayam who is a professor of medicine and obstetrics-gynecology at the University of Southern California and has conducted three studies about this topic in the past two decades. In fact, the heart attack therapies regularly used on non-pregnant patients can make a pregnant woman's heart attack even worse, which can endanger her life, he said.
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Unfortunately, another recent study found that women overall are much less likely to experience chest pain during heart attacks, which makes their conditions much harder to recognize and treat. While the majority of the women in the study on pregnancy and heart attacks appeared mostly healthy, 25 percent did smoke. Hence, the main recommendation from doctors is that if you smoke, the most important thing you can do is quit for your health's sake and that of your baby's.
Did you know that pregnancy increases the risk of fatal heart attacks?
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