Dr Anna Rolleston The Cardiac Clinic

This is an article for the ladies – and for the men in their lives that love them.

Ladies, you are complacent about heart disease and stroke. You think it will happen to your husband, partner, son or male colleague, but that it is unlikely to happen to you. The reality is that in this country, 47 per cent of women will die from cardiovascular disease – heart attack, stroke or heart failure. That is almost half of us – yet I see vastly more men than women in my clinic coming to have their hearts checked.

Complacency may not be the best word to describe womens' typical ascertain that cardiovascular disease is not a big issue for them. Perhaps it's more about the health information marketing – media representations of heart disease have typically depicted men as the sufferers. In addition, in the medical world, women are under-represented in cardiac research and are also under-diagnosed, under-investigated and under-treated compared to men.

So women may not be complacent, perhaps it is simply that we have told women for years that it is men who need to worry most about cardiovascular disease.

Breast cancer is a scourge on our society and The Breast Cancer Foundation has done well to raise awareness of the disease and encourage women to have regular breast checks. It is now a routine part of many womens' health lifestyle to have a mammogram. Breast cancer kills about six per cent of Kiwi women and early detection is key in survival. I iterate, heart disease kills about 47 per cent of Kiwi women – early detection is also key to survival. If you are a woman aged 55 plus please add a heart check to your list of health ‘to dos'.
What every woman needs to know about heart disease:

• The prevalence of heart disease has been falling during the last 30 years, but less for women than for men.
• In the Bay of Plenty District Health board area: Woman have a higher incidence of high blood pressure than men; the incidence of stroke hospitalisation is the same for men and women; the number of deaths from stroke is higher for women than men.
• Women do not experience the same symptoms of heart disease as men and are more likely to have ‘silent ischemia' – a condition when lack of blood flow to the heart occurs without any symptoms.
• Women tend to die from a heart attack, whereas men often survive.
• Women will likely have relatively low risk of cardiovascular disease in their 40s and without any dramatic changes to their blood pressure, cholesterol or lifestyle, that risk will markedly increase in their 50s – after menopause.

It is better to get checked and find you have nothing wrong with your heart and arteries than to not get checked at all and find out the hard way that you should have. Cardiovascular disease is not a mens'disease – it is a lifestyle disease that affects us all. Please get your heart checked.