Moms' Talk: Women Need To Be Heart Smart!

Moms everywhere can relate to having a full daily schedule.  There is work, carpools, meals, schedules and family harmony to keep watch over.  Many of us feel as though there is no wiggle room to fit in one more line item to our agenda – let alone something for us and us alone.  That would be selfish, right? Wrong!

Here we are in the midst of National Heart Month and women need to be ever mindful that cardiovascular disease, leading to heart problems, can affect them, just as it affects their male counterparts.

Do you make it a priority to live heart healthy? Do you have a family history that predisposes you to heart problems?

Dr. Joyce Oen-Hsiao, attending faculty physician in the Department of Cardiology at St. Raphael’s Hospital, stresses that as women we all need to be thinking of ourselves – especially our health – if we are going to be able to be there for our family. 

What Oen-Hsiao and her fellow physicians stress is “Know Your Numbers”: 

• Diabetics need to work to bring their sugars down
• Blood pressure should be 120 over 80 or lower
• Cholesterol  - LDL or bad cholesterol should be brought down and good cholesterol can be increased with exercise
• Body Mass Index needs to be kept in check – obesity is big player in heart disease

Many of these important numbers require lifestyle modifications and Oen-Hsiao says she encourages exercise, eating right and taking necessary medications to control cholesterol, diabetes and other medical concerns.

Symptoms are unique

She says because women's cardiovascular disease symptoms can be so different from men's that many women will often say, " 'It’s no big deal.  I just had a little shortness of breath, but it will go away.’ " This happens, she explains, because “they are busy.  They usually have kids to take care or something else to do.”

The typical crushing chest pain with radiating pain down the left arm is not always how women will present when having a heart event. “Sometimes women just have a little shortness of breath, they’re fatigued,” said Oen-Hsiao.

With the advent of the “Go Red For Women”  campaign by the American Heart Association, bringing women’s heart disease to the forefront, Oen-Hsiao says it is stressed that “cardiovascular disease is something that is very prevalent in women, more so than people would normally think.”

Rather than being a disease for men over 60, “more women die of heart disease than they do of any cancer combined.”  Statistically, she said, one in four women get heart disease, compared with one in eight women who develop breast cancer.

Estrogen protects

Women younger than 40 years old are protected somewhat by estrogen, explained Oen-Hsiao.  While it is unknown exactly why estrogen protects women against heart disease, it is a fact and thus heart disease doesn’t become as big an issue for women until their reach premenopausal and menopausal .

“Women are living to their 80’s now,” cardiothoracic surgeon Richard P. Salzano explained.  “That means many of them are postmenopausal for 30 years.  They are protected to a degree, but not indefinitely and so it’s one of those yes, but…”  

“Women in their 40s and 50s who may be going through peri-menapause,  that’s when they start having the same exact risk factors for coronary disease as men,” said Oen-Hsiao.

“Twenty years ago for cardiac surgery the cross the board surgical outcomes in woman were much worse than in men, and that was a function of the disease not being recognized in women so a lot more women were end stage or much more advanced disease at the time of diagnosis and treatment,” explained Salzano.  “But now that there has been more awareness I think those differences, according to sex, have disappeared,” he added. 

“The emphasis on women’s heart disease has served a purpose,” Salzano stressed.  “It has raised awareness and it has brought women into treatment earlier than they traditionally had been because of recognition of this being not just a male predominant disease.”