Our Number One Killer: The Sex Gap that Costs Women's Lives
From Yale School of Medicine, by Kira Berman:
Why didn’t I know, until recently, that cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the number one killer of both women and men in the United States? As the leading cause of death, CVD takes one American life every 33 seconds. Still, most Americans aren’t aware about the extent of the impact of CVD—even though this is far from a new phenomenon! Heart disease has been the leading cause of death in the U.S. since 1921, and yet, over a century later, less than half of the respondents of a 2023 survey could name the nation’s number one killer. Perhaps most shocking is that heart disease causes more deaths in the U.S. than all types of cancer combined!
Women’s heart health remains particularly neglected and understudied. Over 60 million women in the U.S. live with some form of heart disease — that’s almost half of women above the age of 20. But despite the overwhelming need for better care, women remain underdiagnosed and undertreated, leading to worse health outcomes. For many of them, their symptoms don’t fit the traditional understanding of heart disease that was developed primarily through research conducted on men.