Women experiencing heart attack symptoms delay going to hospital for nearly three hours on an average, says a new study.

The US study confirms that women are more likely to ignore life-threatening symptoms because they think a heart attack is predominantly a 'male problem'.

A recent survey found that fewer than a third of British women are aware that heart disease is the biggest killer of women, with nearly two-thirds believing they are more likely to die from breast cancer, reports the Daily Mail.

UK figures show heart and circulatory disease claims the lives of one in three women - three times more than breast cancer - as well as one in three men, according to the Archives of Internal Medicine.

The US research used data of 104,000 patients with heart attack symptoms from 568 hospitals between 2001 and 2006.

The average delay in arriving at hospital for treatment was 2.6 hours. About 60 percent of patients had a delay time longer than two hours, while 11 percent arrived at hospital 12 hours after first experiencing the symptoms.

Lead researcher Henry Ting, of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, US, said longer delay times meant heart attack patients were less likely to get effective treatment, such as having a stent inserted into a blocked artery.