Ask Stanford Med: Cardiologist Jennifer Tremmel taking questions on women’s heart health

It may surprise you to learn that more than 432,000 women die each year from heart diseases, which is ten times as many women who die from breast cancer. Moreover, previous research has shown that a significant percentage of women have a limited knowledge of heart disease and are unfamiliar with the tell-tale signs of heart attack, including sharp pain in the back, neck or jaw and shortness of breath.

To continue the conversation on women’s heart health, we’ve asked Stanford interventional cardiologist Jennifer Tremmel, MD, to respond to your questions on the growing body of research on women and cardiovascular disease, and how women differ from men.

Founding clinical director of the Women’s Heart Health program at Stanford, Tremmel is an instructor and interventional cardiologist in the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the medical school. Her research interests include gender differences in coronary artery disease, the determinants of vascular access complications and the effects of weight on coronary physiology and cardiac outcomes. She has also completed research exploring the role of negative emotion on the heart health of women.

Questions can be submitted to Tremmel by either sending a tweet that includes the hashtag #AskSUMed or posting your question in the comments section below. We’ll collect questions until Friday, May 4 at 5 pm. When submitting questions, please abide by the following ground rules:

• Stay on topic
• Be respectful to the person answering your questions
• Be respectful to one another in submitting questions
• Do not monopolize the conversation or post the same question repeatedly
• Kindly ignore disrespectful or off topic comments
• Know that Twitter handles and/or names may be used in the responses

Tremmel will respond to a selection of the questions submitted, but not all of them, in a future entry on Scope.

Finally - and you may have already guessed this - an answer to any question submitted as part of this feature is meant to offer medical information, not medical advice. These answers are not a basis for any action or inaction, and they’re also not meant to replace the evaluation and determination of your doctor, who will address your specific medical needs and can make a diagnosis and give you the appropriate care.

Previously: A focus on women’s heart health, Understanding and preventing women’s heart disease and Gap exists in women’s knowledge of heart disease
Photo by Gabriela Camerotti