A recent study revealed that people who experience a heart attack are waiting too long to head to the emergency room. The study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that patients waited an average of 2.6 hours before seeking help, even though they were experiencing symptoms.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 104,000 patients at 568 hospitals between 2001 and 2006. They found that patients who arrived at a hospital between midnight and 8 a.m. on weekdays had a 25 percent shorter delay time than those who arrived between 8 a.m. and 4 p.m. on a weekday. Those most likely to delay seeking treatment included women, the elderly, nonwhites, diabetics, and smokers.

Another study, conducted by the American Heart Journal, focused solely on gender differences to examine which gender waited longer to seek treatment. The study looked at data collected after the 2001 to 2002 public health campaigns of the American Heart Association and the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute that targeted women between 40 and 60 to educate them on heart disease and symptoms of heart attack.

The study examined three time frames after the educational campaign went public: preintervention (2003), intermediate (2003 to 2004), and postintervention (2004 to 2005). It consistently showed that women typically wait longer than men to report heart attack symptoms. Women waited an average of three hours to go to the hospital while men waited an average of 2.8 hours.

These studies stress how important it is to recognize the symptoms of heart attack and to seek help immediately. The studies also suggest that women, in particular, need to pay more attention to their symptoms.