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 Only one in 10 young women surveyed cited heart disease as the
number one killer for women and fewer than one in 20 believed it was
the leading health problem for women.
"More than half of adult women surveyed are aware of this fact, so
the very low awareness we found was surprising, especially given we
sampled a population of young women with access to health care,"
study authors Dr. Holly Gooding and Courtney Brown of Harvard
Medical School in Boston said in an email.
In the short term, young women have a low risk for diseases of the
heart and blood vessels, but their lifetime risk is high, the
authors write in the Journal of the American Heart Association.
"There is clear evidence that traditional cardiovascular disease
risk factors, including elevated blood pressure, blood cholesterol
and blood glucose, have their origins in childhood and adolescence,"
they add.
Gooding and Brown and colleagues posed survey questions from the
American Heart Association (AHA) to 331 young women, ages 15 to 24,
to assess their awareness of cardiovascular disease - including
atherosclerosis, heart attacks, stroke and heart failure -and how it
can be prevented.
Then they compared participants' responses to those from a 2012 AHA
survey of 1,227 women above age 25.
Adolescents tend to focus on the present and don't think long-term,
which might partly explain the results, the authors say. Dr. Claire
Duvernoy, who started the women's heart program at the University of
Michigan in Ann Arbor, agrees.
"That's just the way that adolescents tend to be and that's a
barrier to an education like this, where the risk is more of a
long-term thing," Duvernoy, who was not involved with the study,
told Reuters Health by phone.
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Focus on benefits they'll get now, while they're young, from a
healthy lifestyle, she advises.
The authors believe the most effective way to improve cardiovascular
health is by addressing risk factors before symptoms develop. But
promoting awareness of heart health to young people can be
challenging as adolescents don't tend to discuss cardiovascular
disease with their doctors, they point out.
What's needed, they say, is a multifaceted approach: improving
curricula in schools, training pediatricians and promoting heart
health online.
Independent expert Dr. Maryl Johnson of the University of Wisconsin
School of Medicine and Public Health believes the message for young
people "needs to be reinforced at every opportunity and in a
helpful, not perjorative, way," especially regarding lifestyle
factors over which they have direct control, such as smoking and
lack of exercise.
Dr. Beth Abramson, Director of the Cardiac Prevention Centre at St.
Michael's Hospital, Toronto, told Reuters Health, "We are seeing an
epidemic of risk factors in younger individuals...(and) it is still
true that women sometimes can't believe (heart disease) can happen
to them."
"The face of heart disease has changed. It's no longer a disease of
solely white, grey-haired men. So we need to make sure that these
young women...are aware of their future risk," Abramson said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2UPbEig Journal of the American Heart
Association, online March 5, 2019.
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