The Biggest Killer of Women: Heart Attack

AWAKING EARLY ONE MORNING WITH A tight, nauseated feeling, Catherine McCamey, a retired Washington postal clerk, took two antacid tablets and tried to fall back asleep. But when the tightness in her chest turned to pain, she took a cab to the hospital. There doctors told her that she had suffered a heart attack and that four of her coronary arteries were blocked, and she had to undergo bypass surgery. Two years later McCamey, now 64, remembers her bewilderment over the incident. "I was really shocked," she says. "I thought it was mostly men who suffered heart attacks."

Hardly anyone associates...