Dad's heart attack was A Wake-Up Call

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focus on women

Her life’s direction took a new turn in the early ‘90s, when she grew frustrated that most cardiologists were men and that she was one of only a handful of women at scientific meetings. At the time, more women than men were dying of heart disease and four out of five doctors didn’t know that.
           
“I wondered if we didn’t have the answers for women and heart disease because we didn’t have women scientists,” Lori says. “I started an American Heart Association campaign to increase the number of women scientists in cardiovascular disease and prevention.” In 1997 she helped write the first preventive guidelines for women. She went on to do vital research on women and strokes.
           
“’Women are their family’s heart keepers,” says Lori, who is now director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and author of Heart to Heart: A Personal Plan for Creating a Heart-Healthy Family (Health Communications, 2005). “’If we can educate women about heart disease and how to prevent it, we have the potential to have enormous impact on the health of all Americans.”
           
Only one in every 10 women has no detectable signs of heart-disease risk, she says. “I ask patients the three most important things in their lives. They tell me: ‘My family, my career, my religion,’” says Lori, who is also associate professor of medicine at New York’s Columbia University. “Never once in 25 years has anyone answered, ‘Being alive.’ We sometimes forget what a gift life is. You must carve out time to exercise, relax, and eat healthy meals. Instead, so many of us run around taking care of unimportant ‘urgent’ matters, but never take care of ourselves.”

Diving into Sports
Lori learned to carve out exercise time while growing up. Her father, a mail carrier and part-time janitor, taught his five kids to enjoy sports. “He’d take us to the public pool and tell us if we came up with the number on the pool’s drain, we’d receive a reward. It was years before we realized there was no such number,” she says. By then, Lori was swimming competitively in her school’s only swim team—a boys’ swim team. She set many records and sparked the creation of a girls’ swim team the next year.
           
Ever since, she’s found solace—and inspiration—in sports. Who else would train for an Ironman triathlon to reduce the stress of being a doctor? In 1988, she finished the Hawaii Ironman—perhaps the most challenging of all triathlons, with a 2.4-mile ocean swim, a 112-mile bike ride on black lava, and a 26.2-mile run. “A triathlon is great training for being a scientist because it humbles you and takes extreme dedication,” she says. “And when you succeed, there’s no greater exhilaration.”
           
Competing in athletic events helped her compete as a scientist, she believes. “I learned that when you have a common goal, all barriers melt away,” she says.

Family Matters
Today Lori and others are working on a system—sponsored by the National Institutes of Health—to identify the family members of heart attack and stroke victims.
           
“The seed planted in 1982 has come full circle for me 25 years later,” says Lori, whose father is now 78. “I believe when you’re faced with the catastrophe of having a family member near death, you begin to understand that your life choices make a difference. I hope my research shows that prevention should be extended to the family that shares a patient’s risks, genes, and lifestyle.”