Women and Heart Disease: Ignorance is Costly

By Kathy Kastan

Because heart disease affects so many people, one may think that we as a nation have put the time and resources into figuring out how to reduce its devastating impact. There is, however, an element of flying blind when it comes to women and heart disease.

Women’s heart disease is often misdiagnosed and mistreated due to a lack of adequate and relevant research studies. I am one of the millions of women who got caught in the gray area. My experience with heart disease – which involved misdiagnosis, failed treatments and complications that led eventually to bypass surgery – could have been completely different, and better, if 10 important cardiac research questions had been answered before my symptoms started.

Eight million American women, including 182,000 in Tennessee, are living with heart disease. It kills more women – nearly 367,000 – than men every year and remains the leading cause of death for American women of all ages. Yet too many American women receive inappropriate treatment, and too many health care dollars are wasted, because inadequate cardiac research data continue to contribute to ill-informed diagnostic and treatment decisions. Such ignorance is expensive and often fatal.

We can do better for American women. We can save lives and save dollars at the same time.

I’m not saying that strides in research haven’t been made. A recent National Institutes of Health (NIH) study found that the type of heart disease that affects many women is more often small vessel disease – fundamentally different from the type that affects men and commonly missed by angiograms, the “gold standard” cardiac diagnostic test. That’s great news that will save lives. But there remain critical unanswered questions when it comes to women and heart disease.

Recently, I supported two leading health groups as they released a groundbreaking report on heart disease research in women. WomenHeart: the National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease and the Society for Women’s Health Research (SWHR) published “The 10 Q Report: Advancing Women’s Heart Health Through Improved Research, Diagnosis and Treatment.”

The report identifies the top 10 unanswered questions related to the development, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease in women. These questions are shockingly basic. For example:

Why are women age 50 and younger more likely to die following a heart attack than men of the same age?

Why do women receive significantly fewer referrals for advanced diagnostic testing and treatments for heart disease than men, and how can the referral rate for women be increased?

The questions cover effectiveness of risk assessment and diagnostic tools, the differences in risk and in effectiveness of therapies for men and women, and the need for improved understanding of cardiovascular disease in women. Answering these questions through targeted research could cut the number of women who die prematurely of heart disease by 50 percent over the next decade.

The report lays out a blueprint for a research agenda that can also help save American taxpayers millions of dollars in inappropriate and misdirected health care costs and give doctors the knowledge they need to properly treat the disease. To put it simply, answering the top 10 unanswered research questions in “The 10 Q Report” can lead to better decision making, fewer deaths and real cost savings.

Why should you care? Because there are things you can do to help. Ask your U.S. senators and representatives to place heart disease among women at the top of the nation’s health care agenda. Lawmakers can ask NIH to redirect current research dollars to focus on these 10 critical research questions.

If you are a woman offered the chance to take part in research related to heart disease, take advantage of that opportunity. Currently, women make up only 25 percent of participants in such research studies.

By helping to generate answers, you never know what could happen. Ten years down the road, unanswered questions could become powerful life-saving solutions, and yours may be one of the lives saved.

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Finding solutions to the top 10 unanswered questions concerning heart disease in women could help save lives, and perhaps you can help, says Kathy Kastan .

Kathy Kastan of Memphis is board president of WomenHeart: The National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease.

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