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Women's Health Experts Discuss Cardiovascular Technology Advances for Women
Newswise — The Society for Women's Health Research convened cardiovascular experts on Capitol Hill on Monday to tell congressional staff members about advances in cardiac care for women, including imaging techniques and heart-assisting devices. Despite technological gains in heart disease diagnosis and treatment, the experts said women are still under represented in heart studies and researchers do not regularly provided needed information about differences in the disease between women and men.
"The Society was first to focus attention on the incidence of heart disease in women, long thought of as a man's disease. While it is true that men generally suffer from heart disease at an earlier age, it was not recognized until recently that women suffer from heart disease in greater numbers than men later in life. As a result, women were often misdiagnosed, mistreated, or ignored," said Phyllis Greenberger, M.S.W., president and CEO of the Society for Women's Health Research, a Washington, D.C., based advocacy organization. "Significant gains for women in heart disease have been made over the last 15 years, but a lot of work remains to be done."
Susan Bennett, M.D., clinical director of the Women's Heart Program in the Cardiovascular Center at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., reviewed the past 10 years of research on women and heart disease. Pointing to recently released data on cardiovascular deaths, Bennett said that the number of women dying from heart disease dropped 17,000 from 2003 to 2004. "To put that in perspective, heart disease went from causing 33 percent of deaths to causing 25 percent of deaths in women," Bennett said, "but heart disease is still the leading killer of American women."
Bennett speculated that one reason why women have higher mortality rates with cardiovascular disease is because cardiac procedures and devices are severely under-utilized in women patients compared to men patients. Women receive only 40 percent of all cardiac catheterizations and only 20 percent of all implanted pacemakers. Bennett emphasized that health care professionals need to reduce current disparities between women and men and collect data so that better treatments can be developed.
Leslee Shaw, Ph.D., professor of medicine at the Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, Ga., spoke about the dramatic improvements made in cardiovascular imaging. According to Shaw, using a CAT scan to detect calcium buildup in arteries is a great step in improving the detection of heart disease in women. "We know that women have smaller arteries, so it will take less calcium buildup to block those arteries," Shaw said, than it would in men. "This test allows us to view the amount of calcium buildup to determine if a woman is at risk."
Shaw discussed Coronary Computed Tomography Angiogram, a new, non-invasive heart-imaging test that can take pictures of a heart that a cardiologist can view from many angles. The images allow a cardiologist to see if calcium or plaque deposits have built up in the coronary arteries by rotating the images and viewing blockages from different perspectives. Shaw said the test is very promising, but there is no sex-specific data regarding women and the procedure, which prevents its optimal utilization.
Margarita Camacho, M.D., surgical director of the cardiac transplant and mechanical assist device program at the Saint Barnabas Heart Center at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center in Newark, N.J., spoke about heart devices created for patients waiting for a heart transplant. "With 400,000 heart disease patients waiting for new hearts and only 2,100 transplants being done, ventricular assist devices are a necessity for many patients," Camacho said.
Ventricular assist devices (VAD's) take over the pumping mechanism for hearts that are too weak to pump on their own. Patients will often use a VAD for weeks while waiting for a transplant. Luckily for women, these devices are becoming more compact and better able to fit into a woman's smaller chest cavity.
The briefing was designed to provide congressional staff members with information to support their health care policy work. The event was made possible with support from Abiomed, Edwards Lifesciences, GE Healthcare, and The Medicines Company.
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