Many younger women ignore or simply don’t recognize the warning signs of a heart attack, often because it doesn’t resemble the typical “Hollywood heart attack,” according to a new study.

According to HealthDay News, the study was recently presented at the American Heart Association’s annual Scientific Forum on Quality of Care and Outcomes Research in Cardiovascular Disease and Stroke, in Baltimore.

Study author Judith Lichtman, an associate professor of epidemiology and public health at Yale School of Medicine, says many women in the study said they wish they had a better stereotype because they never see anything in the media depicting a young person having a heart attack, especially those with atypical symptoms.

“The classic image of someone having a heart attack is someone like John Belushi. It’s a heavy man clutching his chest. We never think of young women as having heart disease, so the image is not part of their consciousness,” added Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of Women & Heart Disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City.

For this study, researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 30 women aged 55 and older a week after they had been discharged from the hospital following a heart attack.
Many didn’t realize the symptoms were due to a heart attack. For example, one woman said she was told she was experiencing symptoms of acid reflux, while others attributed symptoms to fatigue, overexertion or stress.

Last year, a study from the same group of researchers found that women under the age of 55 often fail to recognize the symptoms of a heart attack until it’s too late. Eighty-eight percent of women in that trial reported traditional symptoms of severe chest pain. Yet only 42 percent suspected something was wrong with their heart. Only half of the women experiencing heart attack symptoms sought care within the first hour, apparently because they thought their symptoms weren’t real or weren’t serious.

Heart disease is the leading killer of American women, claiming almost half a million lives a year, or about one death per minute. According to background information from the authors, 16,000 young women with heart disease die every year and 40,000 are hospitalized, HealthDay reported.