What every woman should know about heart disease

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By Julie Bain

Coronary artery disease kills as many women as men, yet only half as many women receive aggressive, life-saving treatments. We look at why women may be undertreated-along with some surgical breakthroughs.

Susan G. never thought she’d need coronary artery bypass surgery. She had always eaten a healthful diet, never smoked, and had been an athlete all her life. She ran a ski shop in Goshen, New York, for 23 years and had skied all over the world. “I ran 10K races, I played golf, I played tennis, I swam with dolphins,” she says. Despite a family history of heart disease—a problem she assumed was more of a concern for the men in her family—and a little mild chest pressure from time to time that she attributed to stress, Susan, 61, never suspected she was a heart attack waiting to happen.

Then, several years ago, she learned that her cholesterol was high. When it didn’t respond to several different statin drugs despite her healthy lifestyle, she grew worried. She asked her doctor for a C-reactive protein test and a heart scan. Her scan showed that she had plaque clogging her coronary arteries. So in January 2003, she underwent cardiac catheterization, in which a scope was inserted into her heart to take a look. The findings? Susan had two coronary arteries that were 90 percent blocked. One of them was the left anterior descending (LAD), the major artery of the heart, often called the “widow-maker” in a lingering bit of gender-biased terminology. It likely would have killed her if it had closed completely.

Because of the location of the blockages, Susan was not a good candidate for an angioplasty, in which a cardiologist threads a catheter into an artery in the leg, up to the aorta, and into the narrowed or blocked artery, then inflates a balloon and/or places a stent to keep the artery open. She would need bypass surgery, also known as coronary artery bypass graft (CABG and, yes, pronounced like the vegetable).