Thing you probably already knew: Cardiovascular disease (including heart disease, hypertension, and stroke) is the number one killer of women, according to the American Heart Association.
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The American Heart Association has issued a new scientific statement hoping to close the knowledge gap regarding women and heart attacks. Heart disease and stroke cause one in three deaths among women each year, killing approximately one woman every 80 seconds. Furthermore, biological variables unique to women such as hormonal fluctuation also account for the difference.
“These guidelines are derived both for the physicians to get a better understanding of the symptoms, the differences in treatments that are recommended for women, and then to translate that to their patients”, said Dr. Laxmi Mehta, a cardiologist with Ohio State’s Wexner Medical Center. “Helping women prevent and survive heart attacks through increased research and improving ethnic and racial disparities in prevention and treatment is a public health priority”, she said.
Risk factors for heart attacks also differ in degree of risk in men compared to women. “Most heart disease research is done in men, so how we categorize it is based on men”.
The researchers cited data that found 26 percent of women and 19 percent of men die within a year of an acute MI and 47 percent of women and 36 percent of men die within five years of an acute MI.
Causes: The blockages in the arteries that cause heart attacks form differently in women than in men. If doctors don’t correctly diagnose the underlying cause of a woman’ heart attack, they may not be prescribing the right type of treatments after the heart attack. It leads to the death of half a million American women a year – that’s more than the next seven causes of death combined. Women less often complete cardiac rehabilitation due to competing work and family responsibilities and lack of support.
The study also says women don’t respond as fast to seeking emergency care after experiencing symptoms of a heart attack. “A single Well-Woman visit can give a head to heart view of a woman’s overall health”.
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Wear Red Day kicks off American Heart Month, an annual celebration in February that began in 1964 to urge Americans to join the battle against heart disease.
