Don't Miss a Beat

February 2007 Special Advertising Section

Do you know what poses the greatest health risk in women? It’s hard to fight an enemy if you don’t know what it is. Yet 54 percent of women asked to identify the number one killer of women thought it was cancer. In fact, it’s heart disease.

“Cardiovascular disease kills more women than the next seven causes of death combined,” says Soma Sen, MD, medical director of the Park Nicollet Women’s Cardiovascular Center in St. Louis Park. “There is a big discrepancy between the reality and the fact.”

The Women’s Cardiovascular Center opened in October 2006, just two years after North Memorial opened its Women’s Heart Clinic in Plymouth. These centers are two of the most visible community efforts to build awareness of the urgency of heart health for women. They are part of a nationwide trend of medical centers opening women’s heart centers to improve the delivery of cardiovascular care for women, provide gender-specific care and information relating to women and heart disease (e.g., the effects of estrogen on the heart), and offer a comfortable place where women know their concerns will be taken seriously.

Heart disease, traditionally thought of as a “man’s disease” until rather recently, actually kills more women than men—in part because women live longer, but also because for many years research, prevention, and treatment was targeted to men, and thus women have had a somewhat unfavorable outcome with treatment compared to men.

However, according to Mary Heintz, MD, a cardiologist at the Minnesota Heart Clinic in Edina, that trend may be changing for the better as more and more women are getting the message. “Things have improved significantly over the last five years, and we are seeing women who are at risk much, much earlier,” she says. “In my early career, women had a pretty poor prognosis by the time they were diagnosed.”

Get Personal
Women need to know the risk factors for heart disease—and there are many. These can include age, sex, ethnicity, and a family history of heart disease or diabetes. Other factors to consider are an unhealthy body mass index (an assessment of your body weight relative to height), smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, high blood sugar, a sedentary lifestyle, a stressful lifestyle, and a high-fat diet. But simply being aware of the global risk factors is not enough, experts say.

Women need to take a closer look at their own lifestyle and family history and begin to figure out which risk factors may be specific to them personally. Having a better understanding of this will in turn help women, and their doctors know how aggressive to be when it comes to prevention and treatment, says Victor Tschida, MD, medical director of the Nasseff Heart Center at United Hospital in St. Paul. While women have learned a great deal in the last several years, they haven’t really personalized this information to the point where they think, “this is something I have to do for me,” Tschida notes. “Women need to be looking at heart disease, and they need to be talking to their doctors about it.”

If you’re looking for a quick way to calculate the risk of having an adverse heart event during the next ten years, use a tool based on the Framingham Heart Study (that takes into consideration factors such as age, sex, and blood pressure), Tschida advises. A “one-stop shop” for this tool and other heart information can be found at the American Heart Association’s website.

Take Control
Certain risk factors for heart disease cannot be controlled, such as age, ethnicity, or a family history of heart disease or diabetes. But 80 percent of heart disease is preventable through lifestyle factors such as regular exercise, a healthy diet, smoking cessation, knowing your risk factors, and open doctor-patient communication, says Pam Paulsen, MD, medical director of the North Memorial Women’s Heart Clinic.