In most heart attacks, the cause is clogged arteries. Well, at least in men.

For women, the situation is different. In a little more than half of the time, heart attacks in women are prompted by other problems, including spontaneous coronary artery dissection, blood clots or stress-related triggers. For men under 65, artery-narrowing plaques causes three-quarters of heart attacks.

Determining the different causes and risks is critical to determining proper treatment. A stent to open up a clogged artery does nothing if the cause is spontaneous coronary artery dissection, reports STAT, and SCADs occur five times more often in women than men.

And in a recent Mayo Clinic study analyzing 15 years of data, two-thirds of SCAD cases were missed by the treating physicians.

In the U.S., someone has a heart attack every 40 seconds, amounting to roughly 805,000 people per year. Men have more heart attacks, accounting for roughly 70% of occurrences, but women are more likely to die from a heart attack or suffer more complicated medical consequences, partly because they are often older when they suffer an attack and receive less timely or appropriate treatment.

Body of Knowledge

Humans and giraffes have the same number of cervical vertebrae: seven. The difference is that giraffe neck bones are considerably larger and more elongated, measuring up to 10 inches each compared to less than an inch each for humans.

Counts

83: Percentage of U.S. working adults who say they experience daily work-related stress (Source: Occupational Safety and Health Administration)

Doc Talk

Tumor: One more than one more

Phobia of the Week

Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia: Fear of long words (The longest word found in major English dictionaries is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a 45-letter word describing a lung disease caused by inhaling fine silica dust. The technical name for the protein titin is almost 190,000 letters long.)

Best Medicine

First guy: "You'll never believe who I bumped into on the way to the optometrist."

Second guy: "Who?"

First guy: "Everybody."

Observation

"Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you." — Noted Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung (1875-1961)

Medical History

This week in 1981, aspartame artificial sweetener was approved for tabletop use by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It's permitted for use in candy, tablets, breakfast cereals, instant coffee and tea, gelatines, puddings, fillings, dairy-product toppings and as a flavor enhancer for chewing gum, among others. Its approval was delayed years by health concerns. The sweetener is a mixture of two amino acids: aspartic acid and phenylalanine, and is 200 times sweeter than sugar by weight with few calories. It's marketed as NutraSweet.

Ig Nobel Apprised

The Ig Nobel Prizes celebrate achievements that make people laugh, then think. A look at real science that's hard to take seriously and even harder to ignore.

In 2025, the Ig Nobel Prize in psychology went to researchers who asked the question: What happens when you tell narcissists — or anybody else — that they are intelligent?

The researchers recruited 361 participants from Poland (no joke) who were asked to rate their level of intelligence compared to other people, take the Polish version of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory test and an IQ test. The participants were then split into two groups: one was congratulated on their excellent results, and the other was told they were not smarter than other people.

The findings were not surprising: Narcissists who already had high opinions of themselves had an even more grandiose self-perception upon hearing about how well they performed on the tests. Negative feedback brought some narcissists down a peg, but they no doubt recovered.

Self-Exam

Q: Which of the following structures is not an ossicle of the middle ear?

A) Incus

B) Vestibule

C) Stapes

D) Malleus

A: B) Vestibule. The vestibule is not an ossicle of the middle ear. It is a part of the inner ear, specifically located between the cochlea and the semicircular canals. The ossicles of the middle ear include the incus, stapes and malleus, which are small bones that transmit sound vibrations from the eardrum to the inner ear.

Fit to Be Tried

There are thousands of exercises, and you've only got one body, but that doesn't mean you can't try them all.

Building core strength is essential to balance, stability and reducing fall risk. The bird dog pose is a full-body move that improves balance and stability. It's easily scalable to ability level. This is the easiest version:

Get on all fours, ensuring your hands are directly underneath your shoulders and your knees are underneath your hips.

Keeping your neck neutral, simultaneously extend your left arm and right leg, keeping your hips square to the ground. Pause here for two seconds.

Return to the start position. Repeat with your right arm and left leg.

Epitaphs

"He lies here, somewhere." — German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg (1901-1976). This famous epitaph is not real but is commonly repeated. It's an allusion to Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle, which implies that one may not know the position and momentum of a particle simultaneously. In fact, we know where Heisenberg is — or where his remains are: Munich Waldfriedhof cemetery in Bavaria.

To find out more about Scott LaFee and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

Photo credit: Alexandru Acea at Unsplash