Heart attack and heart disease kill a woman every 5 minutes

In Italy heart attack or other heart diseases kill 124 thousand women a year: one every 5 minutes. But “20% of these deaths”, around 25 thousand, “can be avoided with prevention”. Word of Daniela Trabattoni, director of the Invasive Cardiology Unit of the Monzino Cardiology Center in Milan and head of Monzino Women, the first Italian clinical center dedicated to women's hearts. The Milanese IRCCS will dress in red on February 2nd to celebrate Wear Red Day, the day for awareness of women's heart health, created and launched internationally by the American Heart Association. The USA was in fact the first to realize that heart disease is the leading cause of death among women and that women are more exposed than men to the risk of heart disease, recalls Dal Monzino.

Hence the experts' appeal: “It is fundamental – states Trabattoni – that women learn to do prevention when they are well. Everyone aged 35 to 60 should get tested who today are able to discover any diseases at their onset, but also unknown risk factors which, if kept under surveillance, help maintain perfect heart and vessel health over time. Thinking consciously about heart health – highlights the specialist – also helps to adopt the correct lifestyles that are now known, but unfortunately still not deeply rooted in the female population: weight control through a healthy diet and a good level of activity physical, no to smoking in any form. We remind you that smokers, compared to male smokers, are up to 5 times more likely to develop damage to the arteries and suffer from cardiovascular diseases. Furthermore, even in girls, tobacco can induce the early development of atherosclerosis. The ideal is to never start, but quitting is always a cure-all: the latest studies confirm that quitting smoking before the age of 40 means gaining an average of 10 years of healthy life.”

At Monzino Women, Trabattoni reports, “in 6 years of activity we have welcomed around 3 thousand women and in 20% we have identified cardiovascular risk factors. 5% were worthy of immediate hospitalization, while in the remaining cases we gave indications or drugs that prevented major events.It should also be noted that approximately 27% of the women who accessed Monzino Women showed symptoms of depression, 36% a high level of anxiety and almost 69% a moderate to high level of stress. Depression is a serious cardiovascular risk factor: let us never neglect women's minds”, urges the expert.