im pretty sure transitioning doesn’t affect that
This is a pretty strong claim to make with one data point, and unlikely simply based on the major physiological changes that happen with medical transition.
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innermachine@lemmy.world 4 days agoI know males and females experience heart attack symptoms differently, and im pretty sure transitioning doesn’t affect that. Friend of mine that transitioned suffered a heart attack but didn’t have the classic chest pain symptoms so didn’t know what was going on, and my SO had no idea female heart attack sysmptoms can differ from males and didn’t even know what to look out for and she’s female. Not sure if there are any other ailments that differ in expression between males and females and how transitioning affects them or not! Definatley an interesting field to talk about I think, and one most people aren’t educated enough in.
Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
innermachine@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Male hearts are larger and have different proportions than female hearts, and the camber proportions also differ. There are also differences in the muscle texture itself. I know a LOT can change during transition, but I didn’t think your heart would get restructured due to current gender reaffirming care. There’s another reply to my comment where somebody much more educated than me offered some info! I did not intend to make a “strong claim” about this, I said im PRETTY SURE not that I know because I simply do not lol.
Strawberry@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 days ago
Male hearts are larger and have different proportions than female hearts, and the camber proportions also differ. There are also differences in the muscle texture itself. I know a LOT can change during transition, but I didn’t think your heart would get restructured due to current gender reaffirming care.
All of this may be true and still does not mean that HRT doesn’t affect heart attack symptoms. For most things with average differences based on sex, we simply don’t know when, how and how much gender-affirming hormone therapy changes things, because it hasn’t been sufficiently studied. That’s all I’m saying.
innermachine@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Facts, all these things are as clear as mud. At the end of the day, everybody is a walking sack of chemical reactions and things boil down to ur chemistry more than anything. Every single one is different!
TheMuffinMan@piefed.world 4 days ago
Do you have a source for this?
There is one set of heart attack symptoms, but what differs between male and female populations is their relative incidence. For example, (cis*) women are over 2x as likely to experience pain between the shoulder blades, compared to (cis*) men, and ~33% more likely to experience shortness of breath.
HRT, as part of transitioning, impacts both cardiovascular physiology and pain processing, to become more aligned with the person’s gender. This is of course dependent on the duration of treatment, and also on hormone levels actually being within the healthy range for males/females. Whether “more aligned” means “fully aligned” or just “closer to” is an open question and likely also depends on the specific metric. Whether there are sex-based factors that impact cardiovascular physiology and symptom presentation, that do not respond to hormonal treatment in transitioning adults , also needs further research. There are obvious conclusions to be drawn from the fact that feminising HRT in adulthood does not shrink bones to a more ‘typical’ female build for example, but at that point we’d really be talking about the impact of bone size & stature on cardiovascular health, rather than sex necessarily.
(And then, of course, we have some populations who started transitioning before completing the puberty associated with their natal sex, or who were fortunate enough to be put on puberty blockers before transitioning and so never went through the ‘wrong’ puberty.)
*: research around heart attack symptoms in men vs. women, like most medical research, has historically used data from cisgender patients
Absolutely! I found this meta study on the topic, although the main conclusion is that the studies it covers have various limitations be it in sample size, consistency of the inclusion criteria (some include nonmedical transitioners for example…), or simply the fact that trans populations experience minority stress and socioeconomic differences that have measurable impacts on health. tl;dr way more research needs doing.