Women’s Heart Week: Taking a Beat to Recognize the Need for Gender-specific Care
- Melissa Duban
- Feb 3
- 5 min read
Women’s Heart Week is celebrated each year in the first week of February from February 1 to 7. Although the entire month of February is Heart Month, emphasizing women’s heart health is critical to raise awareness of the need for gender-specific research and treatment.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the leading cause of death for women, and according to the American College of Cardiology, it kills an estimated 204 women per 100,000 globally. Women continue to be underrepresented in funding for research, clinical studies, and medical training, resulting in a lack of scientific knowledge and poor treatment outcomes. According to the most recent data available, only 1% of health care research and innovation was invested in female-specific conditions other than oncology.
Traditionally, complaints of chest pain have been considered the most obvious symptom of a heart attack. However, women often experience heart attacks without chest pain, which can lead to symptoms being dangerously dismissed as an emergency and a delay in seeking care. Extreme fatigue, nausea, jaw pain, back pain, and shortness of breath are common heart attack symptoms in women that could easily be confused for something else. According to the American Heart Association, women’s cardiovascular risks differ greatly from men's. Additionally, lifestyle factors, such as smoking, diet, and metabolic risk, negatively affect women to a greater degree.
Women are less likely to receive accurate and timely diagnoses and evidence-based treatment, which creates significant gaps in care, resulting in poorer outcomes. However, a recent wave of advancements, including blood tests, AI technology, and gender-specific medical devices, is providing a better understanding of the role that biology plays, which may positively influence the prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease in women.
An Echo Chamber of Omission
These gaps in diagnosis and treatment are rooted in a deeper issue: women were excluded from the very research that shaped cardiovascular care. Several factors contributed to the reason that women were historically excluded from cardiovascular research. Medical research used the male body as its primary reference point for decades, treating female biology as a potential source of complication. The misperception that women’s hormonal cycles would complicate studies further resulted in their exclusion. This shaped how studies were conducted and which findings guided clinical care, leaving women with less precise evidence to guide their treatment.
Decades of poor representation in heart-related clinical trials have delayed recognition of and mislabeling of women’s symptoms as “atypical,” and slowed the development of diagnostic and treatment guidelines. Women’s symptoms are also more likely to be dismissed or attributed to anxiety, and basic diagnostic tests like EKGs are not even performed.
This issue is further compounded for Black women, who face the most severe diagnostic delays and worse outcomes. A study found that Black women were 50% more likely to die of heart disease compared to white women, often due to delayed or inadequate care. They also face higher risks of cardiovascular disease during pregnancy, more preterm births, and a greater number of low-birth-weight infants. More than 57 percent of Black women live with high blood pressure, a major driver of heart disease and stroke. Additionally, postpartum risk remains the highest, and preeclampsia rates are more than 60 percent higher.
These disparities reflect structural inequities, unmet social needs, and health system-wide bias. Reshaping how care is delivered, training clinicians to serve diverse communities, and building more equitable care models are imperative to improving outcomes.
An Attack on Equal Representation
The consequences of excluding women’s biology become even clearer when considering the changes that occur across the entire reproductive lifespan. Ironically, excluding women from trials and research based on hormone fluctuation turned out to be counterintuitive. The risk of women’s cardiovascular disease doesn’t just develop later in life but rather evolves across the reproductive lifespan and is shaped by puberty, pregnancy, and the menopause transition. Studies have indicated that reproductive milestones offer early clues about long-term cardiovascular health.
The age of puberty onset can reveal underlying metabolic or hormonal patterns that influence cardiovascular risk later in life. During pregnancy, the heart works harder, and complications like preeclampsia, gestational diabetes, pre-term birth, or low birth weight infants often signal a higher risk in the years ahead. Declining estrogen during menopause changes blood vessel function, and cholesterol tends to rise, which increases cardiovascular strain. Hormones are a vital indicator of women’s heart health at important stages across their lifetime.
Once considered confounding variables, studying menstrual patterns and hormonal shifts is an important key to unlocking essential biological data.
A Flutter of Progress
The need for research across each stage of women’s lives has become impossible to ignore.
The National Institutes of Health (NIH) has made women-centered research a priority by expanding investment in studies that reflect women’s real needs across the life course and is working to close long-standing gaps in evidence, inclusion, and data quality. Recognizing how biological and social factors shape women’s health allows it to be viewed as a lifelong continuum, rather than a fragmented experience that often results in misdiagnosis and poor outcomes.
The NIH has committed $200 million in new interdisciplinary research focused on research, clinical trials, and accessible summaries on conditions that affect women uniquely or disproportionately. The agency is also partnering with the CDC and the FDA to support small U.S. businesses developing women’s health technologies and has increased its investment in private-sector innovation by nearly 25 percent in recent years.
NIH is also strengthening the policies that shape how research is conducted to ensure the inclusion of women in studies from the earliest stages of research through peer review. Women’s health is no longer being ignored or treated as an afterthought. Research priorities, data standards, innovation, and an investment in longer, healthier lives for women across the lifespan are the central focus.
New digital tools are helping women stay connected to care, and researchers are finally designing devices specifically for women. Diagnostics and devices are being designed with women’s bodies in mind, reducing missed diagnoses resulting in more accurate treatment for conditions that have long been misunderstood. A simple blood test can now forecast long-term risk, giving women time to act, plan, and be proactive in disease prevention. AI is being developed to analyze and synthesize data from ECGs, mammograms, health records, and even wearables to identify patterns that previously went undetected.
The real significance is not in any single innovation but in the reframing of women’s health as unique, important, and its own domain. Viewing it from this new perspective will afford better care through accuracy, relevance, and respect.
The Heart of The Matter
Although women were once excluded from the research that shaped cardiovascular care, the scientific community now recognizes how essential women’s biology is to understanding heart disease. Greater investment in studying women’s health across the lifespan, paired with advances in diagnostics, data, and technology, is creating a new path toward better understanding, stronger inclusion, and longer, healthier lives.
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The Future of Connection for Women
Hi, I am Melissa Duban, and I am thrilled to join Her Nexx Chapter as Editor. I am passionate about empathetic storytelling and women’s empowerment. Drawing on my background in psychology and extensive healthcare marketing communications experience, I look forward to creating intentional and meaningful content that resonates, informs, and inspires.
