Newswise — Jolie Busch was an emergency room volunteer when she noticed an alarming number of women having heart attacks. As a former EMT, she saw first-hand how women’s heart attack symptoms were often missed or misdiagnosed and her experiences are supported by research highlighting the important gender differences to be mindful of when diagnosing a heart attack. For example, women under 55 often have more variation in heart attack symptom combinations – not just differences in individual symptoms.
This prompted Jolie to take action. First, Busch met with a colleague at the Los Angeles Fire Department and started looking through their training manuals. Then she went through the department’s entire training protocol, listing all the situations that should be changed to reflect women’s potential heart issues.
Finally, in partnership with UCLA Health cardiologists Marcella Calfon Press, MD, PhD and Tamara Horwich, she developed a 30-minute online training protocol to assist first responders in recognizing and responding to symptoms of heart events in women. This protocol was recently rolled out to fire departments throughout Los Angeles and to paramedic, emergency medical technician and UCLA medical students. They hope to eventually implement this protocol nationwide.
“Things have changed and there’s more awareness of recognizing the differences in symptoms between women and men, particularly in cardiology,” Dr. Calfon Press says. “But it’s taken a lot of time. It’s still the number one cause of death in women, and the public is still not aware of that fact. So, there’s a lot of room to grow in terms of public education.”
Please let me know if you’d be interested in interviewing Jolie and Dr. Calfon Press to learn more about this new approach to prepare first responders to more quickly identify symptoms of heart attack in women.
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