Hi, I'm Naila Boodoo, and welcome to Axios Recap, where we dig into one big story.

It's Monday, October 11th, and today we're focused on heart disease.

Even before the pandemic, women younger than 55 who checked into an ER with chest pain waited 10 minutes longer to be seen than young men.

Here's another shocking statistic. Within five years of a heart attack, nearly half of women will die. That's compared to 36% of men, according to the American Heart Association.

And now, researchers are discovering a strong link between psychological stress and heart disease,

concerning cardiologists who are seeing an increase in stress among women during the pandemic.

In a moment, Marisa Fernandez on how heart disease disproportionately impacts women and how the pandemic has made this all worse.

And we're joined now by Axios Health Care Reporter Marisa Fernandez, who's been reporting on the pandemic's impact on heart disease in women.

Hi, Marisa.

Hello.

Marisa, I think we should first point out that diagnosing women with heart conditions was a problem even before the pandemic. Can you tell us why? Despite a lot of

biological performances that we've had in terms of women's heart health research, there's still

a lot of issues, and a lot of it is, you know,

either systemic or actual diagnoses problems. So sometimes when women come into the emergency

room, they're not necessarily feeling heard, even if they do have chest pains. There's a lot of

studies out there before the pandemic that have shown that women do not necessarily get treated

right away as, as quick as men. And then there's also the

other component where women tend to have heart disease that isn't in some of the main arteries.

And so that part of it is overlooked in terms of the diagnoses and also the scanning.

And so are you saying that the way that we diagnose heart disease has tended to

be towards how men have heart attacks, for example? Absolutely, yes. There's a key component to when we

scan heart and chests, and a lot of it has to do with the symptoms that men experience, which are

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