National Go Red Day 2025

Welcome back everybody. So February is Heart Health Month and today is National Wear Red Day, so hopefully you'll do it as well. The goal is to help raise awareness of the number one killer of women and that is cardiovascular disease. Now it is a cause that is near and dear to our very own Lissette Gonzalez's heart, so she is sharing her own personal story and she's also talking to a cardiologist about the importance of knowing your heart health.

We're both wearing red and not only to support National Wear Red Day but also for the Go Red for Women campaign as cardiovascular is— a leading cause of death for women. Now, here in South Florida, we have a very diverse community, and what demographic is the most impacted by cardiovascular disease?

Really, Black women. Black women are disproportionately affected by heart disease, and it's really because they have a higher incidence, unfortunately, of high blood pressure and diabetes, which are major risk factors for heart disease. And it's also very unfortunate that they're very underrepresented in clinical trials as well. So we're not even quite sure if we're doing the right service by them as well.

And you know, one misconception about cardiovascular disease is that it's typically more for women of older age, but really it can affect a woman of any age. And so I wanted to ask you, at what age should a woman get screened for heart disease?

Never too early to start. So I start screening all of my patients once they're adults for high cholesterol, for diabetes, we check their blood pressure. These are all right— the general risk factors for heart disease. So it's never too young, you're never too young to start checking. And then it's really based on family history too. You know, do you have any genetic predisposition to heart disease? If so, what, what is that heart disease? Who had it? At what age? And that kind of helps the cardiologist and the doctor tailor when we have to really start screening, in-depth screening, for cardiovascular disease.

And I wanted to say it's very important for everyone to be aware of any red flags, symptoms, signals that could indicate that a woman could be having a heart attack or stroke, or a loved one. What are the signs to look out for?

So, you know, we see on television people grab their chest, they feel like they have an elephant sitting sitting on their chest, and that is a very common side, a very common symptom of a heart attack. However, women typically have what we call more atypical symptoms, or symptoms that are not as obvious. So women can also complain of jaw pain, or like a nagging arm pain, generalized and really overwhelming fatigue, like you wake up in the morning and just extraordinarily fatigued for reasons you can't figure out. So kind of those little bit more atypical, harder to kind of sift through symptoms, which is one of the reasons that women don't generally get the treatment that they need either from a physician or they don't seek the treatment that they should be seeking because it's, it's hard for them to gauge whether or not it's their heart.

So we need to be mindful of all of that.

Correct.

And there's a difference between the symptoms that women may experience versus men, right?

Yes, men, like, men generally have those more typical symptoms. Men generally have the, what we call, diaphoresis where they start sweating or they get very short of breath with exertion or they have that crushing chest pain and women statistically have less typical symptoms than men.

Right, well, for me, I have a history of cardiovascular disease. I have a heart condition, so I take medication every day. I go once a year to my cardiologist to have my annual checkup, ultrasound, blood work, and everyone talks about knowing your numbers. For folks out there who may not know what that means, what are those numbers and why is it vital to keep an eye on those numbers and get the blood work done and the tests done?

So, in, in the spirit of women and heart disease, you know, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find any woman that's over the age of 40 that doesn't know when their last mammogram was. Almost every woman can tell you the exact date that they had their last mammogram. And whether it was normal or abnormal. But you'd be very hard-pressed to find a woman that knows what their cholesterol is, one of the numbers, knows what their blood pressure is, another one of the numbers, and knows what their blood sugar or their hemoglobin A1c, which is a marker of diabetes, was. And those are the 3 biggest risk factors for heart disease. So I always tell my, my patients, you should know your numbers like you know your shoe size. So don't just say, oh, were my numbers okay? Yes, and move on. You need to know what those numbers are, what the goal should be for you based upon again, your family history and your own personal, your own personal history, and then make actionable changes with your doctor on how to make those numbers better.

Thank you so much. I know you're very passionate about everyone learning CPR, and I know that that's a big goal of the American Heart Association. So I want to thank you, Dr. Tiffany Di Pietro, for joining us and sharing your insight and your advice. And you know, you can head over to the American Heart Association website. It is heart.org, very easy to remember, and that way you can really inform yourself and hopefully, you know, take better care of your heart health here. And you know, I'm really excited because the American Heart Association is actually going to be hosting its Broward Heart Walk. This is going to take place March 9th at Nova Southeastern University in the morning, and I am serving as emcee, so I hope to see you all there to support the American Heart Association.