By Michael Morton
Nearly half a million American women die every year of the disease, five times the number who die of breast cancer, according to the American Heart Association, which came up with National Wear Red Day for Women as part of a new awareness campaign named Go Red.
Staff at LIJ said the startling statistics were the motivation for the effort.
“It's not even close,” said Dr. Stacy Rosen, chief of the center's cardiology division, referring to the difference in female fatalities between the two diseases.
But while Rosen and other doctors stress that women need to be as concerned with heart disease as they have been with breast cancer, she said they have long suffered from false gender assumptions in the medical world. Heart disease was something men got, Rosen said of a perception that was commonly held until only very recently.
“We didn't include women in research trials as late as the '70s and '80s,” Rosen said. When the AHA did finally hold a convention in the '70s geared toward women, Rosen said the theme was “how to cook heart-healthy for your husband.” That was followed later by a Reader's Digest article in the early '90s about how women could help their husbands' heart disease, she said.
Perceptions began to change with the feminist movement, Rosen said, but since data on women and heart disease only started being collected in the '90s, a full awareness of the problem was not realized until very recently.
Since 1984 more women than men have died of heart disease, and the gap is widening, according to the AHA. While doctors are more educated on the dangers nowadays, the AHA said women still need to become more aware of the risk they face. Thus was born the Go Red campaign.
“With early lifestyle changes, you're going to be in a much better stance going into adulthood and menopause,” said Dr. Therese Giglia, the head of pediatric cardiology at Schneider. She said eating healthy, exercising and not smoking were all ways girls and younger women could reduce their risk of getting heart disease when they are older.
The city's Department of Public Health reported on its Web site that in 2002 274 women died of breast cancer, while a total of 6,976 men and women from the borough died of heart disease. The total for heart disease in Queens was not broken down further by gender, but in that year 10,882 men died of the disease across the city while 13,637 women died.
Rosen said women tend to get heart disease later in life than men and that it can be more severe.
“When they get it, they get it with a vengeance,” she said. The challenge with saving women in time, Rosen said, is that unlike the chest pains men often complain of, women's symptoms tend to be less specific and less identifiable. Rosen said women need to come in for check-ups - men are still more likely to do so, she said - and that when they do they need to tell their doctor about any heart disease in their family.
To that end, LIJ is offering free health screenings Feb. 24 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. Appointments can be made by calling 800-926-7954, though LIJ staff warned there might not be any openings left.
Referring to the success of campaigns against breast cancer, Patricia Farrell, a nurse in cardiology at LIJ, said: “We want to have the same level of awareness for heart disease.”
Reach reporter Michael Morton by e-mail at news@timesledger.com or by calling 718-229-0300, Ext. 154.
