Big news in female heart health: Four major health organizations have come together to create a shared framework and clinical guidance for women's heart health across several different life stages. The American Heart Association, American Academy of Pediatrics, American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG), and Society for Maternal-Fetal Medicine came together to outline the “female life stage" framework to protect heart health from puberty through menopause and beyond. The framework (which essentially acts as a classification system for medical providers) was just published in the journal Circulation.
This is a big deal for many reasons, including acknowledging that female heart health and risk factors change over a woman's life. "This has been a long time coming," says Nicole Weinberg, MD, a cardiologist at Pacific Heart Institute’s Women’s Heart Center in Santa Monica, California. According to the American Heart Association, cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death in women, claiming more lives than breast cancer, lung cancer, and chronic lung disease combined.
But only four in 10 women are aware that cardiovascular disease is the biggest threat to their health. This new framework separates cardiovascular risk factors, along with care needs, throughout the different stages of a woman's life. Here's what you need to know.
Meet the experts: Sadiya Khan, MD, chair of the collaborative writing group and professor of Cardiovascular Epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine; Jennifer Haythe, MD, co-director of the Women’s Heart Center at NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Irving Medical Center; and Nicole Weinberg, MD, cardiologist at Pacific Heart Institute’s Women’s Heart Center in Santa Monica, California The Female Life Stage framework is defined by hormone changes specific to girls and women at different stages of life, hence the name. The framework also recognizes pregnancy as an event that can impact cardiovascular health at any or several life stages. Here's a breakdown of each: Adopting this new way of classifying female life stages “offers a transformative opportunity to equitably improve cardiovascular health for all girls and women," the researchers wrote in the review article.
This has never been done before. This helps address the "fragmentation of care" that can happen between ob-gyns, cardiologists, and other specialists who care for women, says Sadiya Khan, MD, chair of the collaborative writing group and professor of Cardiovascular Epidemiology at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "We're all speaking different languages and we're all speaking different levels of care, yet they're all connected," she says.
The framework is a "shared playbook" that doctors from different specialties can use to guide patient care, along with a language that's understandable and easy to communicate for everyone, Dr. "It's really connecting those aspects of health that we think are disconnected," she says. This new system helps to bridge the gap between viewing cardiovascular care as something completely separate from women's health.
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