TUESDAY, Jan. 31 (HealthDay News) — The good news is that women are becoming more aware of their heart-disease risk, experts report. The bad news is that many still aren’t getting the treatment they need.
“Heart disease is the number one cause of death in women. Cardiovascular disease causes more than 480,000 [female] deaths each year,” said Dr. Alice Jacobs, past president of the American Heart Association (AHA). Yet, Jacobs said, “Women’s chest pain is not taken as seriously as men’s.”
In a Feb. 1 special themed issue, the association’s journal Circulation takes a closer look at the state of women’s heart health in the United States.
The first report in the issue looks at a national study of more than 1,000 women aimed at assessing women’s awareness of their risk of coronary disease.
First conducted in 1997, the study initially found that only 30 percent of women were aware that heart disease is the leading cause of death among women. Today, that number is 55 percent.
Unfortunately, that message doesn’t appear to have been equally distributed. According to the study’s lead author, Dr. Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital in New York City, “We still have much work to do among the populations that are most at risk.”
She said that 62 percent of white women said they realized the threat heart disease poses, but just 38 percent of black women and 34 percent of Hispanic women did.
Heart disease claims more women’s lives than the next five leading causes of death combined, including cancer, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, Alzheimer’s disease, diabetes and accidents, the study authors said. According to the AHA, one in every 2.6 female deaths is from cardiovascular disease (cardiovascular disease includes heart disease and stroke.)
Mosca said the researchers also asked about barriers to treatment, and nearly half of the women said they were confused by some of the messages they’ve received from the media, such as conflicting study reports. Another large barrier — 44 percent — was the belief that God or some higher power ultimately determined their health. One in three women said she didn’t feel at risk for heart disease, and 42 percent felt they were too busy taking care of others to seek treatment for themselves.
The researchers also found that women who were more aware of their risk of heart disease were more likely to take action. And there are many factors that can motivate women to work on their heart health, such as feeling better, living longer, avoiding taking medications and helping their family be healthy, the study found.
Website: Go Red for Women – Official Site