The Cultural Silence Around Women and Heart Disease
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My mentor was 50 when she died from heart disease. She was accomplished, disciplined, and deeply committed to the people around her. Nothing about her life suggested fragility. Yet her passing forced a difficult question into the open: how can a condition that claims more women’s lives than any other illness still exist in the background of public urgency? Heart disease remains the leading cause of death for women in the United States, accounting for roughly one in five female deaths each year. It claims more lives than all forms of cancer combined, yet it rarely carries the same cultural visibility, philanthropic momentum, or sustained public conversation.¹ Part of the silence is structural. For decades, cardiovascular research relied heavily on male physiology as the clinical baseline. Clinical trials enrolled more men than women, and diagnostic expectations evolved around symptom patterns most commonly observed in male patients. The widely recognized image of a heart attack, intense...