“Woman’s heart” has been the subject of poetic musings from time immemorial, but the real thing has only recently started getting the scientific attention it deserves, according to organizers of a Burnaby symposium on Women’s Heart Health this week.
Take hormone replacement therapy.
Hormones used to be handed out like candy to women dealing with symptoms of menopause, according to Vancouver cardiologist Dr. Tara Sedlak, who will speak at the event Friday.
But in 2003, a study by the American Women’s Health Initiative found the hormones increased women’s risk of heart disease, stroke and breast cancer.
“I think it wasn’t properly studied for a long time,” said Sedlak of hormone replacement therapy, “because it was mainly men doing the studies and the questions just didn’t come up.”
The same sort of thing holds true for her specialty, microvascular coronary dysfunction.
Traditional tests for heart disease, like electrocardiograms (ECGs), ultrasounds and angiograms, reveal blockages in the larger arteries of the heart.
Women, however, are many times more prone than men to blockages and spasms in the tiny vessels in the heart branching out from those larger arteries.
Women with the condition experience severe chest pain and often believe they’re having a heart attack, but tests misleadingly show their hearts are fine.
“A lot of people don’t recognize that this chest pain can still come from the heart because, if they’re treating men and the angiogram was normal, they would call it a day and say you’re fine, and that would probably be true, but in women that’s not true,” Sedlak said.
Microvascular coronary dysfunction was unrecognized 10 to 15 years ago, she said, and even today, no test offered in Canada can confirm the problem.
That is about to change, according to Sedlak, who said Vancouver General Hospital – where she is medical director of the Leslie Diamond Women's Heart Health Clinic – has recently secured funding for the diagnostic technology and will soon be the first facility in Canada to offer the tests.
But it comes late in the day for some women, Sedlak said.
“Many patients that are coming to me now have had this syndrome for 20 years, and now it’s very difficult to treat,” she said.
Sedlak said events like Friday’s symposium, which focus on women’s health, help redress some of the biases of the past and give practitioners a more complete understanding of human health.
“It’s a recognition that there are these differences between men and women,” she said.
Besides Sedlak, attendees at the event will hear from local endocrinologist Dr. Mirjana Pavlic about metabolic disease in women, Abbotsford cardiologist Dr. Perminder Bains about heart failure in women and Vancouver internist Dr. Ali Zentner on obesity in women.
The event – at the Riverway Golf Course – is being organized by Burnaby Hospital’s Healthy Heart Program and sponsored by Shoppers Drug Mart and the Burnaby Hospital Foundation.
For more information, email [email protected].
