Feb. 29--Allegheny General Hospital plans to open a center in the North Hills dedicated to women's cardiovascular care, with the hope of decreasing deaths from heart disease.
The Women's Heart Center is scheduled to open Monday in McCandless, and will add to women's health programs that offer services such as mammography, bone density scanning and endocrinology care.
"Heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death in American women and, in fact, one in three women in America will die of cardiovascular disease, so the statistics are staggering," said Dr. Srinivas Murali, medical director of Allegheny General's McGinnis Cardiovascular Center. "If we are looking to improve outcomes for cardiovascular disease, we have to look at women a little more closely and a little more carefully."
Murali hopes the location of the center and its free parking will increase the likelihood that women will seek preventive care.
Those aspects are attractive to Iris Dober of Adams in Butler County.
Dober, 57, has an abnormal heart rhythm and doctors have shocked it back to a regular beat three times. She regularly drives 28 miles to Allegheny General in the North Side for check-ups, allowing an extra 20 minutes to find parking.
"The McCandless center will be so much more convenient," said Dober, a breast cancer survivor who said she might make mammography appointments there.
The center will have diagnostic tools such as echocardiography, MRI and stress tests. Nutrition and alternative medicine practitioners will be available to help reduce the risk of cardiovascular problems through diet, exercise and stress relief.
Murali said prevention is a major thrust, and he recommends women older than 35 with a family history of heart attack or stroke be tested for cardiovascular disease.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center has two similar centers for women's heart care, both located in Oakland, said Dr. Oscar Marroquin, director of the Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC's Heart Center. He said studies in which UPMC and Allegheny General participated more than a decade ago showed women needed better cardiovascular care.
"Women are, in general, underdiagnosed for heart disease," Marroquin said. "And because they're underdiagnosed, they are undertreated for cardiovascular problems. Even when they're treated, the outcomes for women are not as good as for men."
Dr. Rachel Hughes-Doichev, an Allegheny General cardiologist, said women are not well represented in clinical trials, comprising only about 25 percent of people enrolled in heart disease studies. The signs of heart disease in women trend toward a shortness of breath and vague chest discomfort, rather than the chest tightness that indicates a heart attack in men, she said.
Hughes-Doichev will be among four female Allegheny General cardiologists staffing the center at 9335 McKnight Road.
"A lot of women feel more comfortable with a woman physician," Hughes-Doichev said. "I think that women in the field .... can sometimes have a little more sensitivity and awareness, having trained in an era where there was this lack of focus on women in clinical trials."
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