Women in London have been urged to attend a free heart screening service set up in a truck in Battersea.
The Your Heart Matters truck will be located at the Albert Bridge Road side of Battersea Park between 10am until 3pm on Friday. It will offer free health checks by NHS nurses and doctors from St George's hospital.
It is estimated that more than 30,000 women are admitted to hospitals in the UK annually due to heart attacks.
However, figures published by the British Medical Journal show that women are 50 per cent more likely to be misdiagnosed after a heart attack.
Dr Hannah McConkey, an interventional Cardiologist at St George’s who will be participating at the Battersea event, sad: “We know that whilst women often experience similar cardiac symptoms to men, there may be unconscious bias contributing to the clear inequalities which have been documented in the recognition, diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease in women.
"Women are more prone to atypical cardiac diseases such as low gradient severe aortic stenosis and spontaneous coronary artery dissection for example, which still merit careful assessment and treatment.”
“Initiatives like this mobile heart screening truck are so important. If we detect a cardiac condition, we will then provide women with letters for their GPs so they can be referred to their local cardiology departments for further investigation and treatment.”
Dr Clare Appleby, consultant cardiologist at Liverpool Heart and Chest Hospital, and UK Valve for Life Committee lead, said: “I know female patients who have presented at A&E with heart attack symptoms, yet the diagnosis was delayed - relative to male patients - because their symptoms were initially attributed to some other cause.
"This happens in part because heart attacks are often considered, by both patients and their doctors, to be the preserve of middle-aged men. It’s crucial that the public are aware of valvular heart disease symptoms – breathlessness, fatigue, chest pain and blackouts - and that health care professions consider valvular heart disease when assessing their patients."
