The American Heart Association offers information that could potentially save your life. Men are generally more likely to experience pain localized just to the left of the breastbone or in the entire upper chest. Others have pain to the left shoulder and inside the left arm to the waist, and a common combination is pain in the mid-chest, neck and jaw. But women may not have these classic symptoms. Many warning signs associated with chest pain are similar for men and women, such as fatigue, pain at rest, shortness of breath and weakness.
Dizziness is the next most common symptom reported by women, whereas men report arm pain.
When a women's chest pain is related to her heart, the pain tends to be more vague than the type of chest pain men experience. A study presented at the American Association for Cancer Research meeting provides more evidence that grilled, charred and fried meat may increase the risk of breast cancer. In the study, researchers looked at 900 women, a third of whom had breast cancer. They found that those women who ate lots of charred and grilled meat had twice as great a risk of developing breast cancer as women who did not. The key factor appears to be a substance called PhIP, which is produced when meat is cooked at high temperatures during processes such as grilling, broiling and frying.