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fuckyeahgenderstudies:

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fuckyeahgenderstudies:

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brokenheartsandburningwings:

Fuck Yeah, Gender Studies!: Gender and Heart Health: Medicine, why do you have to be a heartbreaker?

Smoking is more likely to give women heart disease than men, a study has found.

Toxic chemicals in tobacco smoke may have a more potent effect on women due to biological differences, scientists believe.

US researchers analysed pooled data on around 4 million individuals from 86 studies. After adjusting for other risk factors, they found the increased risk of heart disease linked to smoking was 25% higher for women.

The longer a woman smoked, the greater her heart disease risk was compared with that of a man who had smoked for the same length of time. A woman’s extra risk increased by 2% for every additional year she had been smoking.
(Heart Disease Risk Greater for Women Smokers— Guardian) 

With new evidence today in the Lancet that smoking-heart disease risk is 25% higher for women, it seems as good a time as any to offer a refresher on how gender plays into heart health.

It’s really fucking despicable that the most advice women as a group receive about their hearts is pretty much to make sure they don’t get broken.

Because—listen (read) closely here—women are dying because this information is not getting out:

Patriarchal medicine kills women.

Sounds like an overreaction, right? Well, it fucking isn’t.
Medicine as a whole is overwhelming focussed on men’s health (funding, publicity, research). This fact has particularly egregious implication when it comes to women’s hearts.
Myocardial Infarction (heart attack) and heart disease kill more American women than men every single year and pose more of a threat to American women than the combined threat of every form of cancer. Unfortunately, many women (and doctors) do not know that the symptoms of a woman having a heart attack can be significantly different from those of a man, and that the commonly publicised “warning signs” and “symptoms” of heart attack are actually not that common.

Like chest pain. 
Yeah, chest pain! You read that right.

 Almost everybody believes that chest pain is the primary and most telling symptom of a heart attack. Not so, not in women. Only about 30% of women will experience chest pain/discomfort prior to a heart attack and 43% won’t experience any chest pain DURING one. At all.
So why do doctors still consider chest pain the most important marker of MI around? Why do so many doctors not even know that men’s and women’s symptoms differ? If neither the public nor those employed to take care of the public know, it’s no fucking wonder so many women are dying.

Major heart attack symptoms in women preceding the attack in order of reported frequency include:

• Unusual fatigue — 70%
• Sleep disturbance — 48%
• Shortness of breath — 42%
• Indigestion — 39%
• Anxiety — 35%

Major acute symptoms during a heart attack in women in order of reported frequency include:

• Shortness of breath — 58%
• Weakness — 55%
• Unusual fatigue — 43%
• Cold sweat — 39%
• Dizziness — 39%

Add to this the fact that heart device studies ignore women.

So—What the fuck?

Why are women being ignored? Why are researchers, physicians and governments ignoring these genuinely grave differences between cardiac function/dysfunction in men and women? 

Can someone please tell me, because i don’t fucking get it.

My sister is a doctor, and she said they’ve known this for quite a while.

That actually makes it worse, you know. Doctors know this stuff but don’t pass the information on to patients? What the fuck kind of shit is that?

There are fresh news articles this week on this subject (e.g. http://healthland.time.com/2012/02/22/heart-attack-in-women-different-symptoms-higher-risk-of-death/) (i originally wrote about this issue in September 2010). Clearly it’s not common knowledge, but if doctors have been aware for ages, why isn’t it?

*people termed women by society because they happen to have a uterus.

I’m not actually sure what lies behind the difference—whether it’s something that’s congenital/innate in the “female” body, or whether it’s because of things that mostly women do/experience (e.g. take oral contraceptives; have greater or lower levels of certain hormones; undergo the stress of pregnancy and childbirth, etc. etc. etc.). I don’t think it’s as simple as uterus/no uterus!
As far as i’m aware, no consensus has been reached concerning the etiology of this difference, and consequently there is no hypothesis that has been tested. 

I would be very interested to see these studies repeated to collect data on trans* folk taking hormone treatments. 

i definitely agree that trans* people need to be included in medical studies, not only because of the possibility of HRT having an effect on diagnosis and treatment, but also because social and environmental factors are significantly different in trans* folk than in cis folk (particularly stress levels, which have been proven to have a significant impact on health).

however, i do think that language needs to be more inclusive. just because trans* people are not being included in the studies being conducted does not mean that we should then report the data in a cissexist way — in fact, trans* erasure in the medical field is another reason why i feel that we need to expand the vocabulary of reported findings.

I’m not actually sure what lies behind the difference—whether it’s something that’s congenital/innate in the “female” body, or whether it’s because of things that mostly women do/experience (e.g. take oral contraceptives; have greater or lower levels of certain hormones; undergo the stress of pregnancy and childbirth, etc. etc. etc.). I don’t think it’s as simple as uterus/no uterus!

it’s definitely not as simple as “uterus/no uterus,” as there are more differences between people than just the organs that they do or do not have in common. however, everything that you just described can and does apply to the lives of some trans* men. trans* men can and do get pregnant, birth children, and take oral contraceptives. additionally, not all trans* men undergo testosterone HRT — meaning that they will have the same varying amounts of estrogen that FAAB women do.

additionally, what you just described is completely neglectful of trans* womanhood. not all women can get pregnant, have a uterus, produce/have estrogen (not all trans* women undergo estrogen HRT), or need to take oral contraceptives. therefore, by claiming that this information pertains to women because of these factors, you are assuming that these are things that all women (or “mostly women”) encounter/experience, which is blatantly not true.

I would be very interested to see these studies repeated to collect data on trans* folk taking hormone treatments. 

i understand that medical literature is one of the most difficult discourses within which to be inclusive of trans* people, but it’s more than just saying that we need to include more binary-identified trans* people in our clinical studies — especially since trying to make that happen is going to be an uphill battle, considering how hard it was to get FAAB women involved in clinical trials and ensure their data was being dealt with appropriately (hint: it’s still not happening effectively). 

in any case, i think that it’s important to use inclusive language because when you don’t, you turn people away from paying attention to information that is potentially extremely relevant to their health and safety. by keeping this language of biological determinism, you discourage trans* folk from seeking medical help and advice, which is something that is scary enough for those of us who have experience with intolerant and cissexist medical professionals.

Yes; I agree with what you’ve said, and will edit the language (in the original post; this i will keep for posterity/instructive purposes) accordingly where i can, but i’m not sure i could report on the data above differently in all cases.

Often the studies (especially where public access to abstracts is not available) don’t specify what they mean by “women”—whether that means ciswomen, people who are/were female-associated at birth, self-identifying women (i.e. cis and trans), cis women and trans women who have undergone hormone treatment and/or genital surgery and/or hysterectomy, or something else—or what they mean by “female” (obviously that varies a lot, too), so i can’t then be clearer or more inclusive myself. And i wouldn’t want to not report these studies because it’s clearly important. 

I think it’s a little unfair to say that “what [i] just described is completely neglectful of trans* womanhood” and ” by claiming that this information pertains to women because of these factors, you are assuming that these are things that all women”. I assume no such thing. I did specify “mostly women” rather than “women” or, worse “only women”— i fully acknowledged that those experiences do not always or just apply to women. 
And the reason i mentioned it at all was to draw a distinction between an etiology that sees these differences coming from an innate sex difference (whatever that might be; the person i was responding to implied uterus/no uterus, which strikes me as bogus but whatever) and an etiology that sees the differences as lying in behavioural/cultural/environmental factors. It is mostly women who take oral contraceptives, experience pregnancy and childbirth, and so on, so it’s reasonable to think that those factors (instead of some innate physiological difference) could explain the difference in heart health and function that the studies showed.