The barrage of numbers about COVID-19 in every news report has naturally and appropriately raised anxiety and awareness about the present health risks surrounding us as we lead our lives in a pandemic. Health experts put the death toll worldwide for the novel coronavirus at a stunning 2 million in January 2021, about a year after it was first formally identified.
As distressing as that number is, it’s a fraction of the toll of heart-related fatalities. In 2019, it’s estimated that worldwide just under 9 million women alone died of heart disease. That’s around the entire populations of Austria, Israel or Serbia, or the city of Chicago. It remains the leading cause of death for men and women in the United States.
“With many members of the population indulging in unhealthy habits and developing associated risk factors for heart disease, what we’re seeing more and more now is that younger women are presenting with a heart attack, even in the premenopausal years, just simply because of the overwhelming burden of risk factors that they have, like diabetes, obesity, smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol,” says Dr. Renee Bullock-Palmer, Director of the Women’s Heart Center at Deborah Heart and Lung Center in the heart of central New Jersey.
Managing these contributors to heart disease is key to reducing cardio-vascular disease risk, but just being female is often -- literally – at the heart of the matter. Dr. Palmer notes that pregnancy complications can even impact a woman’s heart health risk many years later.
Identifying heart health risks at any age is an opportunity to prevent further problems by treating contributing health issues and by changing diet, adding exercise, and dropping bad habits that burden heart function.
Are you at risk for heart disease? Take the Deborah Heart Risk Assessment at HeartDiseaseScore.org.
KYW’s Rasa Kaye talks with Dr. Bullock-Palmer about women’s cardiovascular health and how women (and men) can improve their odds of overall good health.