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Fighting for Your Heart: Education on Women
and Heart Disease
Posted on
Tuesday, February 15, 2011
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The importance of taking
care of your heart. |
While
Women’s Heart Week (February 1-7) spotlights the risk of
heart disease in women, heart disease is an issue for
all seasons.
Heart
disease is the number one cause of death in American
women.
“One in 30 women die from breast cancer; 1 in 2.6 dies
from cardiovascular disease. Women don’t realize their
own risk,” says Dr. Sally Haskell,
Acting Director, Comprehensive Women’s Health for VA’s
Women Veteran’s Health Strategic Health Care Group, and
physician at the VA New England Health Care System.
Dr.
Haskell says women often underestimate the threat and
there’s still the misconception that heart disease is
more of a man’s disease.
But for
women who are dealing with such problems as high blood
pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes or obesity, the
risk is equal, if not greater in some cases.
For
example, diabetes increases women’s risk of heart
disease more than for men’s.
Another
notable difference is that sometimes the symptoms in
women suffering a heart attack can be out of the
ordinary.
“The
presentation of heart disease and heart attack can
present a little differently. Women are a little bit
more likely than men to have atypical symptoms such as
shortness of breath, or pain in the neck or jaw [rather]
than typical symptoms such as chest pain,” says Dr.
Haskell.
Only
recently has women’s heart health come to the forefront
of health conversations. In 2008, Dr. Hani Jneid,
assistant director of Interventional Cardiology at the
Michael E. DeBakey VA Medical Center in Houston, led a
study to investigate the disparities between men and
women’s heart health care.
The
study found that women were less likely than men to
receive the early medical treatments and invasive
procedures critical to combating heart disease.
“What
was fascinating in our findings is that we showed
persistent disparities in care in a very large
contemporary national multicenter registry, and the fact
that women appeared not only to be under-treated but
also to receive more delay in care,” says Dr. Jneid.
Taking Control
Since
then doctors such as Jneid and Haskell have been focused
on educating women Veterans and fellow health care
providers about heart disease.
“We
educate [women] not to discard these symptoms, to seek
medical care early, and to have their risk factors
monitored and controlled,” says Dr. Jneid.
Controlling one’s diabetes, high blood pressure and
cholesterol, eating a healthy diet, getting regular
exercise and not smoking — all can be critical steps to
preventing heart disease.
As part
of the Women Veterans Health Strategic Health Care
Group, Dr. Haskell has partnered with health care
providers to provide patients with methods to control
their risks and to be alert to symptoms.
“We are
not only educating health care providers about the
disease but also educating them in how to talk to their
patients.”
(Source: VA Affair
Office)
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