Barbra Streisand calls for action on women's heart health

Legendary entertainer Barbra Streisand is lending her voice to a new campaign to raise awareness and spark action against a killer that takes one woman's life every minute in the USA – heart disease.

It's the nation's No. 1 killer of women, yet treatment today is largely shaped by research on men. The new campaign, "Fight the Ladykiller," encourages women to talk to their doctors about heart disease, get screened and get educated about how the disease affects them differently than men.

"I'm passionate about gender discrimination. ... When I found out research about women's heart disease was being done on men — down to male mice in the laboratory — it seemed so unjust" Streisand said in an interview Tuesday with USA TODAY. "More women than men have died of heart disease each year since 1984. …Heart disease kills more women than all cancers combined."

As part of the campaign, the Women's Heart Alliance, an organization Streisand co-founded with billionaire businessman Ronald Perelman, commissioned the international research firm GfK to survey more than 1,000 U.S. women ages 25-60 about perceptions around heart disease. The survey will be released Wednesday.

Among them: Nearly half are not aware that heart disease is the nation's top killer, while only about a quarter can name a woman in their lives with the disease. One in four find heart problems "embarrassing" because people assume victims aren't eating right or exercising. And while three-quarters report having at least one heart disease risk factor, only 16% say they have been diagnosed with the disease or told they are at risk by a doctor.

Streisand said heart disease struck her own family; her uncle died of a heart attack at 44, her grandparents died of heart disease, and her mother had bypass surgery at age 81.

Perelman said his grandmother died of heart disease in her 50s, and he supports the cause for three reasons: "Number one, I've got four daughters and a wife. Number two, nobody's done it, and number three, it's the greatest killer of women of everything combined."

But while heart disease affects almost all families and kills more than 400,000 U.S. women each year, less than a quarter of those participating in heart-related studies are women.

"It's very frustrating," Streisand said. "We are still treated like second-class citizens, like our lives are not as important as men's."

Complicating matters, women with heart disease often have different symptoms, such as back or jaw pain, lightheadedness and cold sweats instead of the crushing chest pain men describe.

Streisand said coming to doctors with these different symptoms leads to something called the "Yentl Syndrome," a term based on one of her most famous movies, in which a woman dresses like a man and enters a yeshiva.

"If a woman doesn't present like a man," Streisand said, she will not be taken as seriously or receive the same level of treatment. "If women have symptoms, they don't have to be the Hollywood heart attack — the chest pain and the left arm pain."

In addition to not realizing these different symptoms, women often don't see themselves as at-risk for heart disease, said Holly Andersen, a New York cardiologist and medical adviser to the heart alliance, a collaboration between the Barbra Streisand Women's Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute and the Ronald O. Perelman Heart Institute at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center.

Andersen said a persistent stigma means women don't tell their own stories about heart disease the way they share stories of breast cancer: "We aim to get people talking about it."

She said the alliance wants individuals, and society as a whole, to do more to improve women's heart health. Streisand said only a small fraction — $246 million — of the National Institutes of Health budget is spent researching heart disease in women, compared with $959 million on women's cancer research, and "we need more."

"This is a call to action. Get your heart checked. Know your risk factors," Andersen said. "We need to make women not only aware; we need them to personalize their risk. And we need them to act."