Dr Anne Cahill, director of Memorial Care Women's Heart Health at Long Beach California Memorial Medical Center, sought to boost the "Go Red" campaign that was launched by the American Heart Association in 1997. A two day conference held at the Mansfield Health Education Center was attended by nurses and over fifty physicians from both Montana and Wyoming, all of whom are interested in improving their patients, heart health and their own knowledge of heart disease causes and treatments.
Cahill's talk was titled "Women and Heart Disease, Go Red for Women,” "Why red?" Cahill asked. "Because red evokes excitement, passion and change. Red empowers us to think about change."
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States. More than 13 million adults have coronary heart disease, putting them at increased risk for heart attack, sudden death, angina, heart failure and stroke.
Recent studies have shown that women consider heart attack as a “male” disease & are more worried about breast cancer. According to a survey commissioned by the National Council on the Aging, only 9 percent of women ages 45 to 64 name heart disease as the condition they most fear, while 61 percent name breast cancer.
Dr Cahill said that women tend to have heart attacks later in life than their male counterparts; they have different symptoms and often are treated differently.
“Smoking is the No. 1 leading preventable cause of coronary heart disease in women," Cahill said. Many of the risk factors for heart disease, including diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, can be treated, she said.
“The highest risk for heart disease in women comes after menopause, she said. And diabetes poses "a more significant risk factor in women than men,"
Some statistics about women and heart disease presented by her include:
• One fifth of females has some form of heart or blood vessel disease.
• 64% of women who died suddenly of coronary heart disease had no previous symptoms.
• Cardiovascular diseases killed 498,863 women in 2001 across ths US, this is more than the male figure of 432,245 who died in the same year from the same diseases.
In conclusion of her keynote address Dr Cahill emphasized that women need to take note of the fact that they are equally vulnerable to heart disease & should begin to develop a change in perspective. Awareness of the deadly nature of heart disease has improved over the years, Cahill said, but "we still have a lot of work to do."
