When we talk about heart attack, many people still think that it affects mostly men. And yet cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of death among women, with an average of 200 victims every day in France. A figure that has been constantly increasing for 30 years. An increase partly linked to the fact that women do not know enough to recognize the symptoms of a heart attack, different from those of men in more than half of the cases. Deaths that could be avoided with better information and above all earlier prevention.
So the association “Agir pour le Cœur des Femmes” goes out to meet them with its “Heart Bus” which criss-crosses the country to offer free check-ups with cardiologists. For three days, he stopped in Cannes to raise awareness. The opportunity for Hadjira Mellouki to carry out her first complete check-up. And if all goes well for her, now she knows, we will have to monitor all this more regularly: “We’re talking about the arteries, we’re talking about everything that goes through our body, and the older we get, the more the body functions differently, the immune defenses are different, so it’s certain that this assessment will be very useful to me for watch it all“.
In Cannes, the “Bus du Cœur” welcomed around 70 women a day. A number still insufficient for the cardiologists mobilized. “They are less attentive to the symptoms, shortness of breath, pain and when they arrive, they already have the disease installed or the risk factors installed, and the next step is the cardiovascular accident.“, testifies Nathalie Berkane, head of the cardiology department at the Simone Weil hospital in Cannes.
Finally, when they present cardiovascular risk factors linked to tobacco, psychosocial stress, precariousness, physical inactivity, arterial hypertension, cholesterol, or even diabetes, women must be alert to the five atypical symptoms of myocardial infarction, which are often associated: the feeling of exhaustion, shortness of breath on exertion, acute pain in the back, digestive signs, sudden palpitations.
Thanks to positive and benevolent prevention, in eight out of ten cases, these women can be prevented from entering into the disease.
Thierry DrilhonCo-founder of the association “Acting for the Hearts of Women”