The Health Symptom You Should Never Ignore.(1)

http://www.womenshealthmag.com/health/ignoring-chest-pain

Better safe than sorry, right?

Your heart does a lot of work throughout the day—routinely pushing 1.5 gallons of blood through 60,000 miles of blood vessels, for one—so when you feel some minor aches or pains, you might think that it's part of the job description. But if you tend to brush off heart symptoms and assume the problem will solve itself, you might want to rethink your laissez faire attitude, says a new study published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology. Otherwise you might run into some serious trouble down the line.

The study, which focused on interviews of 31 cardiac patients who had experienced angina (the chest pain that tells you that you are at increased risk of heart attack, cardiac arrest or sudden cardiac death), found that women were 1.5 times more likely then men to wait for symptoms to become more severe and more frequent before seeking medical attention.

What's with the waiting game? Turns out, it had a lot to do with denial.

All patients, regardless of gender, went through the same six stages after experiencing chest pain: uncertainty, denial, seeking help from a friend or family member, recognition of the severity of symptoms, seeking medical attention, and finally, acceptance. The main difference between men and women, they found, was that women stayed in the denial period longer and were more likely to wait for friends or family to notice they were unwell, instead of approaching them with the problem.