Heart Team: Making Ground on Women's Cardiovascular Health

Despite men and women being similarly burdened by cardiovascular disease as a leading cause of disability and death, its impact based on gender is distinct and susceptible to unique factors.

Among women, major adverse cardiovascular events and risk of chronic disease are bolstered by a culture of clinical misinterpretation and downplay of signs and symptoms. The result of female-based disease misconception and lacking real-world data is a perpetual struggle to proactively detect and prevent heart disease in women.

In the latest episode of Heart Trials, a pair of HCPLive expert cardiologists untangle the challenges of women’s cardiovascular disease care with a renowned leader on the subject.

Martha Gulati, MD, Director of Preventive Cardiology, Associate Director of the Barbara Streisand Women’s Heart Center, Associate Director of Preventive and Cardiac Rehabilitation at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, joins Heart Team to discuss current challenges in women’s cardiovascular disease research and clinical advancement. She also shares guidance on improving trial enrollment strategies and patient recruitment, and her thoughts on clinician perception of cardiovascular symptoms in men versus women.

Heart Team is a monthly multimedia series hosted by Jorge Plutzky, MD, Director of Preventive Cardiology at Harvard Medical School, and Michael Farkouh, MD, Director of the Peter Munk Clinical Trials Unit and Vice Chair of Medicine at the University of Toronto.

Prior to speaking with Gulati, Plutzy and Farkouh discuss their real-world encounter with female-pertinent heart events such as spontaneous coronary artery dissection (SCAD), the general sociodemographic and lifestyle differences that drive cardiovascular outcome disparities between women and men, and the role of key clinical factors in women including gestational and menopausal history, and hormone therapy.

A podcast featuring the full interview with Gulati can be found here.