You’re a busy mother with a demanding home and work life. You come home after a long day at the office feeling particularly exhausted — even a little stomach sick.
But with supper to make, homework to check and two loads of laundry to do, you simply pass it off as perhaps stress or overdoing things lately and assume you’ll feel better in the morning.
But the next day, when family members finally push you to see a doctor, you find out it was more than just being overworked.
You’ve suffered a heart attack.
It’s a scenario that is becoming more common these days, according to Mary Ann Butt, chief executive officer of the Newfoundland and Labrador Heart and Stroke Foundation.
With early heart attack signs missed in 78 per cent of women in Canada, and only 19 per cent of women recognizing that heart disease is a serious health concern, Butt says there’s a need for women to become more aware of the threats and to start focusing more on their heart health.
“(Women) are generally focused on everybody else — raising our children, taking care of our aging parents, work life responsibility, home care and keeping everybody else on track. Who comes last? We do,” Butt said during an interview Monday at the association’s offices in St. John’s.
“We need to start encouraging women to start thinking about themselves. You cannot look after anyone else if you don’t look after yourself first.”
Women’s heart health is the focus of the foundation’s Heart Report this year. Dubbed “Ms. Understood,” the campaign is a way to engage the community in conversation about the disease and create a better understanding about women’s heart health, Butt said.
“We’re behind when it comes to women’s heart health,” she said.
Heart disease and stroke are the leading cause of premature death for women in Canada, according to the foundation. In Canada, heart disease and stroke steal the lives of 31,000 women each year — that’s six times as many women who die from these diseases than from breast cancer. A woman dies from heart disease in Canada every 20 minutes, on average.
Newfoundland and Labrador leads the country in cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease-related deaths. In this province, women are dying of heart and cerebrovascular disease at approximately the same rate as Newfoundland and Labrador women dying of all forms of cancer combined.
Butt said too many women are unnecessarily suffering and dying from heart disease because it’s so misunderstood.
Since heart disease has historically been considered a men’s disease, she said, clinical research has included mostly men and was based on an incorrect assumption that what worked for men worked for women.
“From bench to bedside, those therapies didn’t work on women, so we’re two steps behind,” she said.
“We’re just now learning the extent to which women’s hearts are different and that their heart disease is different, too.”
Butt explained that women’s hearts and arteries are smaller than men’s, so things operate differently, with different electrical impulses.
As a result, men who suffer heart attacks often show different signs and symptoms than women. Men often have crushing chest pain, while women generally have fatigue, nausea and/or jaw pain, which might present themselves a few weeks before a major coronary incident, Butt said.
Butt said when it comes to women’s heart health, it’s “under-researched, under-diagnosed and under-treated, while women are under-aware and under-supported.”
She said there’s also a need to educate and encourage the health care system and providers to start thinking about investigating and treating women’s heart disease differently than men’s.
“We truly do encourage women to start the dialogue with their family doctors and health care physicians,” Butt said.
“Open the conversation because generally what’s happening is women are presenting to (a hospital’s emergency department) and the conversation is based on anything but heart health. It’s perhaps not even realized that we’ll look for every other indicator of whatever else might be going on with us, but we don’t think about heart, unless it’s presenting in a very severe way.”
She said if cardiac issues for women can be investigated more deeply, better supports can be put in place upon discharge.
“We know that women go to cardiac rehab after a heart attack, but we also know they don’t stay in those clinics because, again, the pressures of life for women encourage them to drop out of rehab.”
Butt said a better dialogue with the health care system, with the government and in the community at large will help bring the issue to light.
As part of the Ms. Understood campaign, the foundation will hold a government leadership breakfast on Tuesday to share information with provincial leaders on the foundation’s women’s health initiative. Lt.-Gov. Judy Foote will be one of many attending.
“Women are great supporters of each other. They’ll go the extra mile,” said Butt, who noted information can be obtained on the foundation’s website at heartandstroke.ca.
“That’s what this is about — providing them with external support, getting the dialogue going and getting women angry, because the next leg of this campaign is called Time to See Red. It’s time for women to start standing up and recognizing we do not have the same supports and we need them so desperately.”
Twitter: TelyRosie
