The Love My Heart App Can Help Women Manage Heart Health

Steve Adubato goes one-on-one with Dr. Sonia Tolani, Assistant Professor of Medicine at Columbia Doctors and Co-Director of Columbia Women’s Heart Center at Columbia University Medical Center, to discuss the dangers of cardiovascular disease and the “Love My Heart” app which helps women better manage their healthcare and heart health.

1/31/18 #2107

Excerpt:

"Hi, I'm Steve Adubato. Welcome to the Tisch WNET Studio, here in the heart of Manhattan and Lincoln Center. It is our honor and pleasure to welcome Doctor Sonia Tolani, Assistant Professor of Medicine, Columbia University Medical Center. Good to see you doctor. Good to see you too. Thanks for having me. It is our pleasure. We're here to talk about women. Cardiovascular disease, the number one killer of women in this country. Most people know that or don't know it? Don't know it. And not only is it the number one killer, it kills two to three times more than breast cancer, cervical cancer, Alzheimer's, basically all the cancers together. If you look back in the early 2000s, only about 15% of women knew that heart disease was the number one killer. You look last year, we're only up to 50%. So you've got half of women not understanding that the most important reason and thing that they need to worry about is their heart health. So let's do this. Let's break down some of the most significant, quote unquote, "risk factors". Go ahead. Sure. So we have traditional risk factors for everybody. And those are diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking, and having a family history of someone having a heart attack or a stroke at a young age. Women have those same risk factors. Some of them happen to be even more deadly for women, so while diabetes doubles the risk of having heart disease for a man, it triples the risk for having heart disease... Triples? ...for a woman. Right. And smoking, bad for everybody, but about 25% more deadly for women than for men. On top of that, we have other risk factors that we're just learning about and understanding in the last couple of years, that make women more susceptible to having heart disease. Share. So complications during pregnancy, something called pre-eclampsia, is… Pre-eclampsia? Pre-eclampsia. So that is some... a disorder of pregnancy where the mother, the woman carrying the child, gets very high blood pressure, even if they have minor increases in their high blood pressure, any high blood pressure during pregnancy at all, or any diabetes during pregnancy at all, increases the risk that a woman's gonna have a heart attack later on in life. Because pregnancy is sort of a stress test that your body is going through, and having high blood pressure or diabetes during that period of time is a... is a marker that that woman is at risk for having heart disease later on in life. Doctor let me ask you, for... for you as a...."