Women may need to take matters into their own hands when it comes to keeping on top of heart disease, reports a recent evaluation on the state of current standard diagnostic testing for the killer disease. Today’s routine tests for heart disease tend to focus only on significant blockages in the arteries, something that is more common in men than women. However, since plaque seems instead to collect in smaller vessels in women—which can ultimately lead to ischemic heart disease (IHD)— plaque is much harder to detect in females using typical testing methods. Existing coronary angiography and x-ray exams of the heart chambers are not specific enough to detect problems in many women.

Doctors working on the NHLB’s (National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute) Women’s Ischemia Syndrome Evaluation (WISE) project recommend that women and their physicians pay special attention to any symptoms that may point to heart disease, even if they get a clean bill of health from standard testing procedures. While there is no non-standard “off-label” testing being utilized today to identify these female-specific kinds of problems now, clear communication between a woman and her doctor is key to detecting the disease early on.

Source: Gardner, A. (2006). Standard test misses heart disease signs in women: Angiograms don’t find blockages in smaller vessels that women tend to have, study shows. HealthDay division of ScoutNews, LLC and Health On the Net (HON) Foundation, January 31. Retrieved online July 19, 2006 from http://www.hon.ch/News/HSN/530679.html.