Despite recent advances in the recognition and treatment of heart disease in the U.S., heart disease remains the number one killer of women, accounting for approximately 500,000 deaths annually. While the prevailing wisdom has held that heart disease is primarily a man’s disease, women are becoming more aware of the threat of heart disease, a fact not appreciated until relatively recently. Moreover, the CDC reports that although the overall U.S. population has seen a decline in the death rate from heart disease over the past two decades, the decline has primarily benefited men, since a similar decline for women over the same time period is not apparent.

There are multiple reasons for gender disparities in heart disease, including lack of education and awareness at the community level, lack of screening programs with individualized risk assessment, the use of diagnostic tests developed but validated primarily in men, lack of professional awareness and lack of preventive focus, and different symptoms of heart disease in women. Add to this, social barriers to access for health care, and the result is a recipe for higher mortality and morbidity in women.

To address this knowledge and standards gap, the Foundation has provided a grant of $180,000 to AWHP to design an accreditation and credentialing program for women’s heart programs. This grant builds on support provided in 2005 by the Foundation to help define the mission and strategies for the organization. The group will launch the initiative in May 2007 in Washington, D.C.

The European Society of Cardiology and the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation have formed a partnership for an initiative to improve the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of cardiovascular disease in women in Europe. The project consists of three elements: a scientific "policy conference" on cardiovascular disease in women, which produced the first scientific statement from the ESC on the topic; a scientific track at the 2005 ESC meeting and a "Women at Heart" physician and patient awareness campaign; and capacity building for the Euro Heart Survey to collect and interpret gender-specific data on clinical practice. The ESC received a grant of $333,000 from the Foundation for these activities. In March 2006, the ESC’s policy statement on women and heart disease was published in The European Heart Journal and figured heavily in the European Commission’s first Women’s Health at Heart Conference, also held in March 2006. In April 2006, an informal meeting of health ministers from across the EC focused on women and heart disease. A toolkit was developed for use by national heart societies on the subject. The company’s business units in Europe have also supported the program by participating in a variety of related regional, national and EU level activities related to gender-specific research on heart disease.

While some 28 million American women are living with the effects of cardiovascular disease, ethnic disparities in cardiovascular outcomes are significant. African-American women have a 69 percent higher death rate than Caucasian women, and African-American women also have a higher prevalence of hypertension, diabetes and obesity. In addition, they face more barriers to access to cardiovascular care. The center, which opened in March 2006, will seek to increase the promotion and research of women's health issues, especially as they relate to cardiovascular disease, in African- American and other minority women.