Heartfelt Campaign

By Amanda Cuda, Connecticut Post, Bridgeport

Feb. 1–Donna Mazzucco was vigilant about heart disease her whole life. Yet it still managed to sneak by her.

The 52-year-old Stratford resident’s father died from a massive coronary when he was only 45. His siblings also died young from heart disease, and Mazzucco’s brother died at 7 months old, from complications due to a hole in his heart.

She always knew in the back of her mind that she was vulnerable to heart disease. But she was still surprised when she was diagnosed with a heart condition in 2004.

During a trip to San Francisco, she had been climbing a steep hill when she felt sudden chest pain and had trouble breathing. The pain passed, and she finished her vacation, but, when she returned home, she saw a doctor. Subsequently, she learned a main artery to her heart was 90 percent blocked, and she needed an angioplasty.

“I was scared, given the cardiac history in my family,” Mazzucco said. “But I never thought I was at that point. I felt fine. If I hadn’t taken that vacation, I might never have known.”

According to the American Heart Association, heart disease is the No. killer of women older than 25. Cardiovascular diseases kill about 500,000 women each year, more than the next seven causes of death combined. In Connecticut, these illnesses claim the lives of about 6,000 women, more than the next four causes of death combined. Yet many women either aren’t aware of their risk for heart disease, or don’t recognize symptoms of the illness. And many still consider cardiac illness a man’s disease.

February is American Heart Month, and Friday is National Wear Red Day, on which everyone is encouraged to wear red to help raise awareness about heart disease and women. The National Institutes of Health’s Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Md., founded Wear Red Day in 2002. The event is part of the heart institute’s The Heart Truth campaign, which aims to educate women about cardiac illness. “Heart disease is treatable and preventable,” said Patrice Nickens, Heart, Lung and Blood Institute program director. “If women understand the risks, they can live longer and live better quality lives.”

In honor of the event, the heart institute is holding its fifth annual Red Dress Collection fashion show at Mercedes Benz Fashion Week in New York on Friday. Other national and local agencies plan to recognize Wear Red, including the Connecticut chapter of the American Heart Association, which will sponsor a Go Red for Women luncheon at the Hartford Hilton on Friday, along with other events. Since the initiative was launched, Nickens said women’s knowledge of heart disease has increased dramatically. In 2000, the instituted did a poll showing that only 34 percent of women thought heart disease was a serious health issue. A similar poll in 2005 showed 55 percent of women were aware of the peril of heart disease.

Even better, Nickens said the number of women dying from the disease is slowly decreasing. In 2002, one in three women died from heart disease, she said. In 2004, one in four were felled by cardiac illness.

“It’s really quite heartening,” Nickens said. “More and more women are aware, and fewer are dying. But there are still challenges.”

One such challenge is that women don’t get the classic heart attack symptoms, namely the “elephant on the chest” sensation that men often get. Women’s symptoms are often subtler — stomach pain, fainting, recurrent dizziness, arm pain, and pain between the shoulder blades — and thus harder to identify.

Even when women do have chest pain, they’re more likely to overlook it, or postpone seeing a doctor than men are, said Dr. Kathleen Harper, co-medical director of the Women at Heart program at St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Bridgeport. Women at Heart is an outreach program that educates women about heart disease.

“Women tend to be much more stoic,” Harper said. “They tend to withstand greater amounts of pain. And by the time they get to a doctor, the damage is more severe.”

Not only do women need to know the symptoms of heart disease, they need to know if they have any risk factors for the illness.

Family history, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, being overweight, not exercising and smoking can all make women vulnerable to cardiac illness. Nickens said just one of these risk factors can double the risk for heart disease.

With that in mind, the American Heart Association has launched the Go Red Heart Checkup, which allows women to assess their risk for heart disease online, through the site www.GoRedForWomen.org. Women can enter their weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and receive reports on their risks of having a having a heart attack or suffering from cardiovascular disease in the next 10 years.

“This is a really a way for us to reach many, many women in a place where they’re most comfortable — at home,” said Robert Townes, spokesman for the heart association’s Connecticut chapter.

The site also might encourage those women who don’t know their cholesterol, blood pressure or other important information to seek those numbers out, Townes said. Suzanne Quintner, cardiac educator at Bridgeport Hospital, also thinks it’s important for women to be aware of their risks for heart problems. “Women know the risk factors, but they often don’t recognize them in themselves,” she said.

Even when they recognize their risk, they’re sometimes reluctant to change their lifestyles, because it’s usually inconvenient, Quintner said. “Cooking heart healthy food is easy,” she said. “But it’s a lot easier to pick up a pizza.”

Quintner works with women after they’ve had a heart event, showing them how to lower cholesterol and blood pressure, and otherwise decrease their risks. She worked with Mazzucco, teaching her to live healthier following her angioplasty. At 5 feet 6 inches and 140 pounds, Mazzucco isn’t overweight, but she didn’t exercise regularly before she was diagnosed with heart problems, and had high blood pressure and cholesterol. Now, she exercises three times a week, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday at the Stratford Athletic Club.

Her ordeal has taught Mazzucco that women, who often neglect their own needs to take care of others, sometimes have to put themselves first. “You need to take care of yourself,” she said. “You’re important, too. Heart disease can be very, very silent, and you can die.” For more information on women and heart disease, visit The Heart Truth Web site at www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health/hearttruth/index.htm or the Go Red For Women site at www.goredforwomen.org.

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Copyright (c) 2007, Connecticut Post, Bridgeport

Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Business News.

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