Dr. Betty Murray explains why cardiovascular disease kills more women than men realize. About 60 million American women have some form of CVD, but women often get misdiagnosed with anxiety because their symptoms look different. She says women need to take prevention seriously, especially in midlife.
I want to talk a little bit about women's health and sort of the first things to think about is the fact that women think that cardiovascular disease is a men's disease. You know, in the United States, the last stat I read, 60 million women, which are about 44%, are living with some form of cardiovascular disease, heart disease, stroke risk. And there's a whole bunch of things that are going on here. We've been largely underrepresented in cardiovascular-related research. And I think a big part of what also gets missed, we often have more fatal cardiovascular events, whether stroke and heart attack, because we don't even present like men. And, and so we often get told, oh, it's, you know, it's your anxiety, or you're just fatigued. And so women just assume that it's not happening. So we get misdiagnosed. And so I want to go in today and help women understand how much cardiovascular disease is of importance, and that it's a midlife thing that we need to work on so we can have a better lifespan and healthspan.
