NOW YOU KNOW

Heart disease is the number one killer of women in this country. Number. One. It kills more women than the next four diseases combined, including all forms of cancer.

But it didn’t kill me. At age 37 and in training for a marathon, I had a heart attack. With no risk factors save a family history of high cholesterol, I thought I knew enough to stay safe. I didn’t, but you should.

February is American Heart Month and I really want you to take it seriously. Not for me, because I survived and I’m healthy and thriving. But for the 500,000 other mothers, daughters, sisters, nieces, wives, lovers, and friends who will have a heart attack this year, and the 300,000 who will die from it.

Did you know that:

• 8 million American women are living with heart disease; 35,000 are under 65.
• The biggest risk factors are high cholesterol, high blood pressure, obesity, diabetes, smoking, and family history.
• Women’s hearts respond better than men’s to healthy lifestyle changes.
• 80 percent of cardiac events could have been prevented through healthier choices.

And if you knew the dangers and knew your risks, would you make the changes necessary to protect your heart? Would you:

• Talk to your doctor and get a lipid profile to check your cholesterol levels.
• Know your Body Mass Index and lose weight if you need to.
• Know if your blood pressure is high and take steps to improve it.
• Stop smoking.
• Make sure your doctor knows if you have a family history of heart disease or high cholesterol.

I knew that I had a family history of heart disease. I knew I had high cholesterol. I knew that women often explain away their symptoms: "I must have lifted something funny, hurt myself in yoga, maybe its heartburn," all excuses I used for days as the pain steadily grew worse for two days beforeI went to the hospital. And I knew that women's heart attacks present differently than men’s and seem somehow, inexplicably, hard for doctors to spot. I knew all that and I still never imagined this could happen to me.

But it can, it could, and it did, and it could happen to you or someone you love. And now you know.

FIND OUT MORE

The Heart Truth is the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute’s women’s awareness campaign, and the original Red Dress campaign. Check it out for videos, prevention tips, warning signs, and information about how you can participate in and promote national Wear Red Day in February. www.hearttruth.gov.

Check out Go Red for Women, a program of the American Heart Association, for its great nutritional center, free risk assessment tool, and a social tool “Tell 5 to Save Lives.” Go Red for Women also produced the Elizabeth Banks short video “Just a Little Heart Attack.” www.goredforwomen.org

Sources: American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health, Women’s Heart Foundation.

NO EXCUSES

I like this phrase from this public service announcement: "Don't make excuses, make the call."

My symptoms were pain in back, shoulders, and arms, and fatigue. I made lots of excuses for my symptoms. You shouldn't.

Please take 60 seconds to watch, and then pass it on.

FABULOUS FUNGI

If you click the image you can see it larger. Thanks, Yale Heart Study.

I love this infographic shared by the Yale Heart Study this week. It makes parsing the heart-healthy diet rules much easier. Avoiding saturated fat is the easy part; remembering all the other rules is harder. (Though I'm pleased to report I'm doing very well in the red wine 1-2 glasses per day category.)

The whole section devoted to "cooked Asian mushrooms" was a new one for me, so I did some research. I always thought mushrooms were a tasty but nutritionally benign food; I didn't know they had health benefits like broccoli, kale, almonds, and salmon. What a fortuitous discovery for my heart-friendly cooking adventure!

WHY WAIT?

"I think there's something wrong with me. In case I don't get back in time, you'd better stay here and take Owen to camp."

I said something like this to my husband around 8:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, after I'd spent the whole night awake, whimpering in pain and popping Advil four at a time. Once I finally told him how I was feeling and we decided I had "better get checked out," I didn't call 911 or rush to the ER.

Nope. I ate breakfast, helped pack for camp, took a shower, styled my hair, supervised a pre-schooler potty break, and put on makeup. For my date. With a heart attack.

Why do people who suspect they are sick or in danger delay seeking help to attend to family, work, pets, or in my case, my hair? That is the question that a group of researchers at Yale University are trying to answer through the Yale Heart Study.

I took the study myself about a month ago. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, it is a simple online survey designed to understand why people wait, on average, four hours to go to the hospital when having heart attack symptoms. If you are a member of the heart disease awareness community (I am now, of course, card-carrying), you know that "time is muscle." Every minute counts.

The problem is, heart attacks can be sneaky, particularly in women, and it is not unusual for people to mistake heart attack symptoms for indigestion, heartburn (my excuse of choice), anxiety disorders, fatigue, or asthma. Add to that our tendency to put everything and everyone else first.

Here's how the study's primary investigator, Dr. Angelo A. Alonzo, describes it:

We are so embedded and invested in our daily lives that we are very, very reluctant to just drop everything and seek medical care. We have to be certain it is a real problem, we have to finish the task at hand, we need to make arrangements if we are hospitalized, we have to cancel appointments, our work activities are important to our identity, and we are too strongly tied to our social obligations to just leave them. . . only when the signs and symptoms become so overwhelming do we willingly go.

This is indeed exactly what happened to me, and the denial didn't stop in the parking ramp (yes, I drove myself). I called home to make sure rain gear was packed for camp. I called again from the ICU to give instructions on what to pack for my younger son's trip to my brother's house while I was in the hospital. I emailed work colleagues after my first surgery. It took nearly 24 hours in the hospital before I gave in and let go.

The idea behind the study is to understand why individuals like me make the decisions they do. With this knowledge, an effective intervention strategy can be devised to get people to the hospital faster. Says Dr. Alonzo: "The irony is that one gets the most therapeutic benefit if one is in the hospital within the first hour of acute symptoms onset."

The study has reached about 15 percent of its goal of 2,300 participants. They are seeking survivors of all ages, men and women, willing to share their experiences to help others. It takes about 30 minutes to an hour to complete (you can save and return to the survey if you are short on time). It is also completely anonymous.

If you or someone you know has had a heart attack, please encourage them to take the study. It may save someone else time and muscle, or quite possibly, their life.

For more information, visit https://heartstudy.yale.edu/hacs/ or email heart.study@yale.edu.