Women urged to take health studies to heart

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It was supposed to be a good week for women's hearts.

Health advocates had been spreading the word about today's "National Wear Red Day," a nationwide campaign to raise awareness that heart disease is the leading killer of women. Health experts cheered a Lifetime television poll released Thursday showing that a majority of women finally recognize the dangers of the health condition.

And a study published Tuesday heralded the fact that women are increasingly taking preventive measures -- getting annual checkups and exercising -- to reduce their risk of developing the disease.

But there was bad news, too, with one team of researchers determining that doctors examine women less thoroughly for heart problems than men, and another finding that many women appear to have a different form of heart disease -- one that often goes undetected by standard screening tests.

"There is such a huge knowledge gap in terms of the development, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease in women," said Nancy Loving, executive director of WomenHeart: the National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease. "It's really incumbent on all of us to refocus our efforts and better serve these women."

Experts say the medical community has made great strides in the past decade in recognizing that heart disease isn't just a man's disease. But the new research shows that additional gains are still needed.

Cardiovascular disease now claims more women's lives than the next seven causes of death combined. Since 1984, more women have died from cardiovascular disease each year than men.

Scientists say they are beginning to understand why.

New data released this week indicates that women are typically not diagnosed or treated as aggressively as men. Their symptoms are often quite different from men's, with women often feeling milder discomfort rather than the sharp pain men often experience. And women tend to underestimate their own individual risks for heart problems.

"There was a fallacy that women didn't get coronary disease. It's a bias we're still fighting," said Dr. Eleanor Levin, chief of cardiology at Kaiser Permanente Santa Clara Medical Center.

Although heart disease kills more than 480,000 American women each year, much of the existing scientific research has focused solely on men -- or included only limited numbers of women.

Many of the medications aimed at battling cardiovascular disease were only tested on men. Scientists used to be reluctant to include women of child-bearing age in pharmaceutical research studies, fearing that if they became pregnant, their fetuses could be harmed.

Even the gold standards for diagnosing heart problems, such as angiograms, appear to be better suited to finding disease in men, according to the Women's Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation study, which was released this week.

In a separate study published Tuesday, researchers in Europe determined that women are less likely to be closely screened for heart disease and less likely to be prescribed preventive medicines than men. They also found that one year after initially seeking treatment for heart problems, women were almost twice as likely as men to have suffered a heart attack or died.

"Women's chest pain is not taken as seriously as men's," said Dr. Alice K. Jacobs, past president of the American Heart Association.

Health experts encourage women to play a greater role in their heart health, to recognize possible signs of heart problems and take steps to reduce their risk of developing them.

But doctors, for their part, must do a better job at recognizing that a woman's symptoms may signal a serious heart problem, they said. Chest pain, discomfort, shortness of breath, nausea, vomiting and back or jaw pain should all be taken very seriously.

"Physicians feel comfortable with a Dick Cheney walking through the hospital with chest pain. But when you get a younger, slender, 50-year-old woman walking through the door with chest pain, their automatic response is, `It's got to be acid reflux, stress or a psychological condition.' They do not think heart," Loving said. "This really has to stop."

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