Uninformed doctors can contribute to women's heart disease death rate, but even that contribution is controllable because we can choose our own doctors (unless the notorious, socialist Clinton Health Plan is adopted, in which case choosing our own doctor becomes a federal offense with a prison sentence for both doctor and patient). Women whose physicians understand women's cardiovascular disease and heart attack symptoms and who urge them to pursue necessary lifestyle changes, medication, surgery, and/or cardiac rehab have far higher recovery rates than women who choose less informed, assertive doctors. On the other hand, women's smaller blood vessels do complicate surgery, so there are valid reasons for some gender differences.
Make sure your doctor knows that postmenopausal women heart patients are severely under-treated with medicines known to prevent additional cardiac events, including the newer SSRI-type anti-depressants which help prevent second heart attacks with far lesser side effects. Women having heart attacks are also less likely than men to be put in intensive care, and a recent study showed that only 33% of women were given beta blockers, 18% given ACE inhibitors, and 53% given cholesterol-lowering drugs. In fact, the most-ill, highest risk women were the least likely to receive these medications, often because their doctors are not following the latest research and treatment guidelines. Women who received aggressive treatment, such as automatic catheterization after a mild heart attack, were less likely to have a repeat heart attack, need re-hospitalization, or die. It's up to you to choose your physician based on knowledge and practices rather than just on bedside manner.
So what should women do to significantly cut their risk of premature, unnecessary, often preventable heart disease? Oddly enough, this list happened to hit 12 steps:
Learn women's unique heart disease and attack symptoms.
Find a doctor who knows them and treats them and their female cardiovascular patients aggressively with the proper tests, lifestyle changes, meds, and procedures.
Dump self-induced high blood pressure, diabetes, cholesterol, and triglycerides by dumping excess weight through exercise and a proper diet such as Mediterranean or South Beach . . . maybe the far more stringent Pritikin or Ornish diets if you already have advanced heart disease.
Non-diabetics should dump that stupid low-carb, high-fat diet before it harms them. Whole grain cereals and breads are vital to the prevention of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease because they provide important nutrients and discourage over-eating.
Stop smoking or breathing others' smoke.
Match men’s willingness to improve their lifestyles.
Get off HRT estrogen unless your menopausal hot flashes are intolerable.
If you have high cholesterol, diabetes, or heart disease, you probably need statin drugs. They do great thing for our health, including unblocking clogged heart valves to prevent open-heart surgery, reducing CRP, and increasing bone density to reduce the risk of fractures.
Eat plenty of catfish, clams, orange roughy, oysters, salmon, sardines, shrimp, or tilapia. Other fish are less healthy, with shark and swordfish particularly risky.
A little chocolate strengthens heart muscle and relieves heart pain. A lot is still too much fat.
Before your bypass surgery, make sure your husband watches a video that presents an optimistic view, not the full pros and cons, of the recovery process. Wives whose husbands do this return to the hospital 25% less often and have fewer complications.
For the future, tests are under way to evaluate synthetic HDL and drug treatments for the heart-harming FLAP gene, and heart stem cell discovery and research may lead to heart muscle regeneration.
All these steps except the four magic bullets we opened with are simple to follow. Those four magic bullets may require real effort, but millions manage them just fine, and so can you. The motivation for that effort comes from the realization that women with significant heart disease risk are much more likely to lose their quality of life, quite likely life itself, far earlier if they ignore those magic bullets.
Ladies, the vast majority of your heart attacks and strokes are optional. Enlist and accept the help of your family and a good physician in choosing another, far later, way to leave this earth.
