The U.K.’s British Heart Foundation has launched a $10 million international fund for research into cardiovascular disease in women, in collaboration with 11 other major NGOs.
It’s the first time this group – the Global Cardiovascular Research Funders Forum — has launched a kind of joint, global research pot of this magnitude.
The ‘International Research Challenge on Women’s Cardiovascular Health’ will provide up to $10 million over five years to address this unmet need.
The announcement follows an expert statement from British doctors warning that women in the U.K. and around the world remain “underdiagnosed, undertreated and unrderrepresented” in cardiovascular research.
No.1 Global Killer
Heart and circulatory disease kills more women than any other type of illness. Yet female patients continue to miss out on life-saving treatments, the consensus statement from the British Cardiovascular Society said.
Treatments for heart and circulatory conditions have improved markedly in recent years, with many cases of cardiovascular disease now preventable, physicians wrote in the consensus statement, which was published in the journal Heart.
But women are still dying because medical professionals and the wider public often think women aren’t as vulnerable to heart disease as men.
Cardiovascular disease “takes the lives of one in four in women here in the UK,” said British Heart Foundation chief executive Charmaine Griffiths.
The picture is similar in the U.S., with heart disease behind an estimated one in five deaths of American women, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
‘Myths And Unconscious Biases’
“Myths and unconscious biases within clinical practices and societal perceptions further obscure the reality that heart disease does not discriminate by sex,” the Heart statement said.
In fact, women’s cardiovascular disease risk is often amplified by social and financial isues, as well as the long term impact of physiological processes like menopause, the authors wrote.
But women’s concerns about symptoms often go ignored, leading to poorer outcomes and avoidable deaths, they said.
“There is so much we need to understand to save our moms, sisters and loved ones,” Griffiths said. The new global fund “will back the world’s best scientists to unravel mysteries that have shrouded women’s heart health for generations.”
“By joining forces with other world-leading funders, this challenge promises to make real progress, saving and improving more women’s lives worldwide,” she added.
Raising Awareness
The British Cardiovascular Society experts made numerous recommendations to improve heart disease outcomes for women.
They called on heart specialists and their professional bodies to raise awareness of the how common cardiovascular disease was among women, as well as the risk factors that make it more likely. They also called on researchers to include women in clinical trials.
Patients they added, can support the cause by providing peer-to-peer support, while the public health system could host ‘dedicated women’s heart hubs’ to provide tests for risk factors like blood presure, weight and cholesterol, the statement suggests.
British Cardiovascular Society president André Ng said his organization would work with patient groups and public health service leaders to identify key steps “that will bring transformative change to improve care and achieve better outcomes for cardiovascular care in female patients.”
