Symptoms of heart disease in women including back pain, dizziness or nausea are often interpreted as something else, leading to unnecessary deaths each year. Experts are convening at WCC 2016 in Mexico to call for better understanding of heart disease in women.
Health professionals, policy experts and scientists from around the world are today uniting at the 5th International Conference of Women, Heart Disease and Stroke (which takes place at WCC 2016) to address the epidemic of cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) in women.
Despite there being general awareness of CVDs (which includes heart disease and stroke), they’re still the number one killer of women around the world, responsible for over two million premature deaths in women each year.
Women in low and middle-income countries who develop CVDs are more likely to die from it than those living elsewhere in the world, and these deaths are predicted to increase over the next decade unless more is done to tackle the problem now.
Johanna Ralston, Chief Executive Officer of the World Heart Federation, commented: “Preventing and managing CVDs in women is absolutely vital if we are to meet the target of reducing CVD deaths by 25% by 2025. As well as educating health professionals we need women to know what to look out for – many women today think cancer is the biggest threat to their health when in fact it’s their heart.”
