Machine learning shows no difference in angina symptoms between men and women

The symptoms of angina--the pain that occurs in coronary artery disease--do not differ substantially between men and women, according to the results of an unusual new clinical trial led by MIT researchers. The findings could help overturn the prevailing notion that men and women experience angina differently, with men experiencing "typical angina"--pain-type sensations in the chest, for instance--and women experiencing "atypical angina" symptoms such as shortness of breath and pain-type sensations in the non-chest areas such as the arms, back, and shoulders. Instead, it appears that men and women's symptoms are largely the same, say Karthik Dinakar, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and Catherine Kreatsoulas of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Dinakar and his colleagues presented the results of their HERMES angina trial at the European Society of Cardiology's annual congress in September. Their research is one of the first clinical trials accepted at the prestigious conference to use machine learning techniques, which were used to characterize the full range of symptoms experienced by individual patients and to capture nuances in how they described their symptoms in a natural language exchange.