Prometheus 6

Differences on a biological level aren't better or worse, they're just different…cosmetic at best. It's our outlook and history that make them damaging or enabling.

In this case, because research on heart disease has traditionally been done on men, women's specific physical issues were overlooked. Results: more women dying of what is essentially an untreated disease. This would probably not be the case had research for women been done on the same terms as for men. But it wasn't, and that's not the result of any conscious decision.It's the result of all the accumulated decisions, probably since the first Homo Sapiens assumed an alpha role in its tribe.

Once you know there's a difference like this, what do you do?

You start taking it into account. You do more research on heart disease in women,

You take affirmative action to address the shortcoming.

Heart Disease Differs in Women
Usual Tests, Drugs May Not Work Well

…Doctors are starting to realize that many women probably have Kastan's kind of heart disease, as well as other forms that differ in essential ways from the well-known pattern that strikes most men. This new understanding -- that heart disease may be a fundamentally different disease in many women -- has far-reaching implications for medicine's ability to defend women against the nation's No. 1 killer. Contrary to persistent misconceptions, heart disease claims the lives of more women than men.

"The whole disease is poorly understood in women, from the expression of the symptoms all the way down to some of the basic mechanisms," said Carl J. Pepine, a cardiologist at University of Florida's College of Medicine in Gainesville. "The disease has a very broad spectrum, and more men are at one side and more women are at the other side."

Instead of one main blockage, arteries in many women go into spasm or have smaller, easily missed buildups along their entire lengths, which can be just as dangerous as one big one. And often the problems lie not in the major arteries that nourish the heart muscle but in the frequently overlooked smaller branches.

These differences, frequently found in younger women, could help explain why the symptoms are often so different than in men, why women are often misdiagnosed -- or never diagnosed -- why they commonly are not treated until much later, and why women are more likely to die from their heart disease even when they are treated. The standard tests, drugs and procedures simply may not work as well for many women.

"We are just now starting to describe this really for the first time," said C. Noel Bairey Merz, a heart expert at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. "We hear about how women are treated less aggressively than men, and how they eventually have worse heart attacks and are more likely to die with their heart disease. We can see how this could culminate in that way."

This new understanding is emerging only now because heart disease research has traditionally focused almost exclusively on men. Experts assumed that women's tendency to fare so poorly was the result of not being treated as early or as thoroughly as men.