A Woman’s Heart – Which is the greater threat to a woman's health: breast cancer or heart disease?
Unfortunately, even many women who survive heart attacks still don’t take the disease seriously. A Mayo Clinic study showed that women survivors are less likely to participate in rehab programs. Among 1,821 men and women, only about 40 percent of the women chose to attend postcoronary exercise and health improvement programs, compared with nearly 70 percent of men. Of those who participated in the Mayo Clinic programs, the three year survival rate was 95 percent while the survival rate for those choosing not to participate was only 64 percent.
Women of all ages must learn to think in terms of heart disease prevention. Although heart attacks are more likely to occur after menopause, the roots of the disease start in childhood or adolescence and develop over a lifetime. Long term abuses include an unhealthy diet, cigarette smoking, alcohol consumption, and insufficient exercise. These plus other lifestyle and psychological stressors slowly accumulate, leading to deterioration of the cardiovascular system.
Vive la difference!
Surprise! Surprise! Women are not small men with inconvenient plumbing and reproductive differences! There are distinct differences between women’s and men’s bones, brains, skin, saliva, and hearts. For years, it was believed that when it came to heart disease, men and women were physiologically the same. The breakthrough came in in 1991 when The Female Heart by Dr. Marianne J. Legato was published.
