3-Feb-2024

I watched another TED-Talk by Noel Bairey Merz about comparing disease in men and women. She addresses that as we have seen women conquering breast cancer, this is what we need to do with the heart. In the 50’s and 60’s, many people believed the theory that heart conditions were primarily a man’s problem, but that has been proven wrong when a statistic shows that more women die in the U.S. than men today. What researchers learned was that the remedies and treatments developed for men weren’t working as well for women. The newfound goal of the heart disease campaign was to be as good and effective as the breast cancer campaign. Scientists began questioning why heart disease isn’t as recognized in women as it is in men, and later figured out that it’s because women don’t look like that “male-pattern heart disease” that we have spent the last few decades trying to understand. The Women’s Health Initiative (WHI) has informed us a lot about women’s health problems, such as hormone replacement therapy, osteoporosis, breast cancer, and more. Dr. Merz describes and compares the heart disease patterns of men and women: Women erode, men explode. Angiograms have allowed us to see the disease and body patterns in men, but it’s quite hard to detect those patterns in women. To provide an example, an angiogram was provided showing the fatty plaque patterns in both men and women. Now, a non-invasive angiogram is being worked on so that we can just as easily detect disease in women. After using a newly developed Cardiac MRI, we are able to see what’s called a microvascular coronary dysfunction found in women. A benefit of this new system is that it doesn’t have radiation. One of the cutting-edge areas of this study is stem cell therapy. Questions and curiosities rose as to why women and men are different. Studies show that female stem cells, even when put into a male body, do better than male stem cells in a male body. Over the last 15 years, deaths have tremendously decreased in women, but their numbers still remain higher than male deaths. There’s still a long way to go to create bigger impacts, but there’s no stopping now.