Some Heart Disease Hides In Many Women

(CBS)  For years, researchers have suspected that women develop heart disease differently than men.

Now, according to The Early Show medical correspondent Dr. Emily Senay, the latest results from ongoing studies of heart disease in women offer new evidence that those suspicions are correct, when it comes to diseased heart arteries.

For Part Two of this week's "Heartscore" series, Senay spoke with Antoinette Jordan, whose chest pain remained a mystery for years, despite numerous doctor visits and diagnostic tests on her heart.

"I've had ekgs (electrocardiograms) that showed nothing. …I was given a cardiac catheterization. The results of that were I had clean coronaries. I had no blockages."

Jordan finally got some answers from Dr. Nathaniel Reichek, with the help of magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI.

It showed that, even though she has no blockages in her large heart arteries, she does have serious abnormalities in the smaller blood vessels in the heart, which are depriving her heart muscle of oxygen.

"It's very subtle," Reichek says, "but it's not getting as much blood supply."

A large, long-term study of gender differences in heart disease recently found Jordan's heart problem to be very common.

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