Your Health: May 6, 2002

HEART TO HEART Equality of the sexes, it seems, does not extend to matters of the heart. A new study suggests that men and women have strikingly different vulnerabilities to heart attack. For women, emotional stress from, say, divorce or the death of a loved one is more likely than physical stress to trigger sudden cardiac arrest. For men, the opposite is true. What accounts for the difference? Researchers suspect that levels of adrenaline, which can cause the heart to beat abnormally fast, probably shoot up in women when they're upset and in men when they're doing the heavy lifting.

THE...

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