Toronto-based study aims to fill gap in knowledge about women’s heart health

For Ellen Valter, 58, volunteering in a cardiac study at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto is a way for her to contribute to science in a field that lacks comprehensive information for women.

“I have found it difficult to find information on the health effects of women my age and older in various conditions that old age seems to bring with them,” she said. The flow.

Cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, affecting both men and women. However, women have historically been underrepresented in cardiovascular disease research, and experts say this lack of knowledge puts women at risk.

“I think until recently…because men have heart attacks a bit earlier than women, there was initially a perception that heart disease was a man’s disease,” said Dr Susanna Mak, cardiologist and principal investigator of the study.

This study seeks to engage post-menopausal women like Valter to address this knowledge gap about women’s cardiovascular health.

Mak said the study involved placing monitors in a patient’s blood vessel system to measure heart and lung pressure, as well as blood flow.

She said it’s invasive, but for context, these measures are also taken routinely in critically ill patients.

“A patient who might be waiting for a heart transplant will have some of these types of monitors,” she said. “So they will live with these monitors for a few days at a time – and these are people with very fragile hearts and lungs, and they can actually tolerate these monitors with relatively minimal risk.”

“For healthy people who have fairly robust hearts and lungs, the monitors themselves are actually a very, very, very low risk.”

Different experiences

Mak’s research focuses on understanding “how the mechanisms of the heart and circulation work” and how this is affected by aging.

Additionally, she wants to understand if heart complications are different for men and women.

“Post-menopausal women and men … experienced cardiovascular disease slightly differently,” she said. “So things like strokes and heart failure may be more common in women as they get older than in men.”

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Although men and women suffer from cardiovascular disease in relatively equal numbers, there are some differences in the manifestations of the disease, particularly in terms of reproductive aging, Mak said.

“For example, from the moment a woman starts having children – the same goes for her first period – we are in our reproductive part of our lives,” she said. “Some of the hormones during this time actually protect women somewhat against things like vascular disease. .”

“[This] That’s why, as you get a little older, men get coronary heart disease a little earlier than women, because they don’t have that protection.”

But when women become perimenopausal, they lose some of these protective hormones, Mak said.

“When they lose some of that protection, they actually experience the slightly different chronological aging effects than men do,” she said.

Address knowledge gaps

This is especially important to understand given the lack of research on women’s cardiovascular health.

“Because the manifestations are different and we age differently and maybe women get some of these diseases at a later date, we only found out after doing these studies properly that women were just as affected. only men.”

Dr Veronique Roger, a cardiologist and principal investigator at the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, said Mak’s research was “essential”.

“She deserves tremendous credit and kudos for filling these knowledge gaps with the necessary scientific rigor,” she said. The flowis Matt Galloway.

Roger said several factors have contributed to the lack of knowledge about women’s cardiovascular health, such as most of the test animals being male and the reluctance of female volunteers to participate in studies.

“Then, too, that investigators, scientists would not recognize the critical importance of parity in this engagement in research and therefore would not deploy the methods to be able to reach women as they reach men for enrollment and l study,” she said.

One of the main reasons why this gap is difficult to close, according to Roger, is the lack of awareness among women about the importance of heart disease for their health. She says the community is “losing ground in the percentage of women who are aware of it.”

“It’s important to educate women because when you present with certain forms of cardiovascular disease, many of them actually present acutely,” she said. “The very effective treatments we have are very time-sensitive.”

“So if a woman – or a man, for that matter – is sitting at home and has symptoms that might make her think she has something wrong with her heart, a stroke or her brain , it is very important that she sees a doctor in a very timely manner, urgently so that these urgent treatments are used.”

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Diversity in the field

Moving forward, Mak says it’s important for the scientific community to “recognize what has been missed in the past.”

“Where we see gaps, where we see women were underrepresented, it’s important to go back and repeat some of those experiences and make sure women are properly represented and understood,” said she declared.

For Roger, part of the solution is also having more diversity on the pitch.

“It was recognized that diversity … is really critically important – having more female cardiologists and having more diverse population cardiologists, including race and ethnicity,” she said.

“There is scientific evidence that the relationship with patients will be built more trustingly and therefore more effectively when both men and women or members of certain racial and ethnic groups can identify with their provider.”

Produced by Enza Uda.