Introduction
Yentl was the young heroine in Nobel prize recipient Isaac Singer's short story from the
Lublin Jewish community. Yentl had to dress and act like a boy to be able to attend
school and get educated in the Talmud.
Cardiovascular disease is the leading killer of women and men, however, in 1998, for every 1,000 males hospitalized with heart disease, 45 received coronary artery bypass surgery. In contrast, for the same number of women hospitalized with heart disease, only 18 underwent the surgery. In this webpage we will attempt to identify the underlying causes for this gender discrepancy in the diagnosis and treatment of cardiovascular disease. These causes we are exploring include social factors and physiological factors. We will address social factors such as physician attitudes, misperception of the risk of cardiovascular disease, and other factor that put women at a disadvantage. As for physiological factors, we will touch upon how women show lighter symptoms and complications tend to be more severe.
Cardiovascular disease is a major threat to both women and men, however, this is not to say that they will show equal symptoms or will suffer from complications to same extent. However, the current practice does not take this into account. This is manifested as the Yentl Syndrome, where once a woman showed that she was just like a man, by having severe coronary artery disease, then she was treated as a man would be. Due to the different nature of female physiology, we believe that the current practice of diagnosis and treatment need modification.
Forty-one percent of all women die from cardiovascular disease
Women are ten times more likely to die from heart disease than breast cancer
More women than men have died from heart disease since 1984
A woman is nearly twice as likely as a man to die from a first heart attack
A woman’s cardiac symptoms may be different from a man’s
Women are underrepresented in clinical trials
Onset of cardiovascular disease is about ten years later in women than in men
Every minute a woman dies from cardiovascular
CVD remains the leading killer of women in the United States and in most developed areas of the world.
In the United States alone, more than one half million women die of CVD each year, exceeding the number of deaths in men and the next 7 causes of death in women combined.
The majority of heart attacks in women are preventable
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women, yet only 8% of American women realize it is a greater threat than cancer
One in every three women dies of heart disease. One in 30 dies of breast cancer.