Keeping the Women we Love Healthy

Women's heart health should be on women's minds every day, not just during February.  Spreading the word on how heart health differs between men and women creates awareness that hopefully empowers women to understand their own heart health and take appropriate action if facing it. The 'Hollywood' heart attack --where a sharp pain in the left arm and shortness of breath perhaps exemplify what a heart attack looks like -- couldn't be farther from the truth.  The fact is women have heart attacks in a totally different manner that may or may not include the symptoms we are so used to seeing. According to the information provided by ACLS Medical Training, while men generally exhibit the typical symptoms of chest pressure and pain, women generally exhibit symptoms that are not well-known, leading them to delay seeking treatment.  Women who are having a heart attack often feel pain in areas outside the chest, including the jaw, neck, abdomen, legs, and arms. Severe...

The Doris Howell Foundation starts the year with the lecture “Understanding the genome 10,000 experiments at a time: applying genomic approaches to understand autoimmune disease in women" with Sonia Sharma, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Division of Cell Biology, La Jolla Institute for Allergy and Immunology and Director of the Institute’s RNAi Facility. I want to say that, as with everything that has to do with women, 10,000 experiments to better understand autoimmune disease in women sounds about right.  But ask any woman with an autoimmune disease, and it is definitely no laughing matter; even though the warriors that live with autoimmune disease might often joke about it themselves.   For reasons that are yet not fully understood, autoimmune diseases affect more women than men.  As an example: The statistics are stunning! According to the American Autoimmune Related Diseases Association, Inc.:   To start, it is quite diff...