New York Post, Tuesday, August 6, 2019nypost.comHealth&Fit ness
MISS
DIAGNOSIS
From mental illness to
heart attacks, women
have suffered in silence
as doctors ignore their
symptoms. Finally,
medical research is
paying attention
By MELISSA MALAMUTS
OMETHING surprising hap-
pened when Edna Haber went to
the doctor a few years ago, com-
plaining of dizzy spells and feel-
ing like something was “off.” Af-
ter a barrage of tests, her charts
came back clean, so she was pre-
pared to be dismissed and told
nothing was wrong with her.
Instead, Haber, a healthy and vibrant 80-
year-old, says the strangest thing happened.
“My doctor said, ‘I believe you.’ ”
Haber’s cardiologist, Nieca Goldberg, MD,
sent Haber home on a Friday with a heart
monitoring device to wear over the weekend
that would send readouts back to her medical
team.
“I got a call Sunday night asking what I was
doing, but I was just watching TV,” says Ha-
ber, a retired mortgage broker living in
Westchester. “My report showed flatlining.
My heart was stopping.”
By Monday, she was having a pacemaker
implanted.
For decades, the medical field has dis-
missed female health concerns. Women have
been told that they’re imagining symptoms of
heart attacks and other life-threatening ail-
ments, and few resources have been devoted
to researching their medical problems, but, at
last, that seems to be changing.
“In 2018, half of the research participants in
clinical trials for new drugs were women for
the first time in our history,” says Amy Miller,
Ph.D. and CEO of the Society for Women’s
Health Research, a DC-based nonprofit
founded in 1990. “We have gotten very close
to parity.”
Just 30 years ago, women weren’t even al-
lowed to be used as test subjects in most Na-
tional Institutes of Health-funded clinical tri-
als because researchers were afraid of a new
treatment’s possible effects on a pregnancy
— it took weeks to confirm back then — and
because of the belief that the menstrual cycle
makes females “too difficult” for scientific
study.
“Women’s health has pretty much been ig-
nored in biomedical pathology for our entire
human history,” Miller says.
Goldberg, the medical director of the Joan
H. Tisch Center for Women’s Health at NYU
Langone Health, says that she often sees
women who have had their concerns dis-
missed by another physician.
Heart problems in women can be tricky be-
cause the dramatic, sweaty, chest-grabbing
“Hollywood heart attack” symptoms most of
us associate with cardiac arrest are more
common in men.
In women, the signs of a serious heart issue
are often quite different and more subtle,
such as experiencing shortness of breath, ex-
treme fatigue or even pressure in the upper
back.
“It’s portrayed as this middle-aged man’s
disease,” says Goldberg, the author of “Dr.
Nieca Goldberg’s Complete Guide to
Women’s Health.” “For a long time, research
was really lagging because they didn’t even
think women could be at risk for heart
disease.”
But, increasingly, doctors are taking
women’s heart issues more seriously. Cardio-
vascular disease is the No. 1 killer of women
in the US, according to the American Heart
Association, accounting for one out of every
three female deaths annually.
Last year, a study in the Journal of the
American Heart Association found that
women with a bigger waist-to-hip ratio were
at greater risk of having a heart attack thanLuis Rendon/NY Post See WOMEN on Page 30