B.C. journalist honoured for exposing inequity in care for women's heart disease

A medical journalist based in Kelowna, B.C., has received a media award from a major U.S. health advocacy group for exposing how the medical profession fails to take heart disease in women as seriously as it does in men.

Shelley Wood, editorial director of New York-based nonprofit Cardiovascular Research Foundation and managing editor of its medical news portal TCTMD.com, was awarded the Wenger Award for Excellence in Media from the U.S.'s National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease in Washington on Monday.

Presenting the award, University of Arizona cardiologist Martha Gulati said the profession needs Wood's challenging questions and sharp insight into gaps in health care to promote better awareness of the condition in women.

Inadequate support for women's heart disease has been documented on both sides of the border.

Over the past decade, medical researchers across Canada have found women often don't receive care for heart attacks as quickly as men do, while medical professionals tend to downplay women's risk of heart attack — which may explain the higher rate of death by heart disease among women.

Wood graduated from the master's program in journalism from the University of British Columbia, where she specialized in medical journalism. She has been a medical journalist covering cardiology since 2000.

She spoke to CBC's Radio West host Sarah Penton about why she's passionate about improving care for women with heart disease.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and length.

Where does that passion come from?

The number of women working in cardiology hovers somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent, and yet obviously women going into medical school these days make up either 50 per cent of a class or even slightly more. 

So when I first noticed there weren't that many female cardiologists, it immediately took me to the fact that female cardiologists are also the ones that are going to be perhaps advocating for their female patients better. They're going to be doing research that affects women.

That's how I became interested in this — I thought this must be an area that's being overlooked, only because the people that would champion work in women are actually not going into the field.

How long ago did this begin for you? 

I noticed it right away — you go to these conferences and there are just not a lot of women presenting research. If you look at the studies themselves, there are not that many women enrolled in the clinical trials.

How are you feeling about the advancement? Where are we now? 

At the awards ceremony, there were these women getting up to talk about their experience of not receiving medication that a man would receive, or complaining to their doctor or to a paramedic about symptoms and being told: "Oh, you're young; that's not what it is; do you really want to go to the hospital? Are you sure you want to do that?"

Women are just really not being taken seriously. 

I can't help but think that if more was being done to remind physicians that women need to be included in studies and they need to be paid attention to, the National Coalition for Women with Heart Disease wouldn't need to exist. 

Why are things the way they are when it comes to not including women in research? 

I think a big problem is that women actually tend to develop heart disease later. When you're studying a new drug or a new device, it's often that enrolling people in clinical trials only happens up to a certain age. You don't, for example, enrol women over 65 in an experimental study. But if women don't develop cardiovascular disease in many cases until they're later, they don't get enrolled.

What are you most proud of in the work that you've done? 

I'm glad that my work is touching physicians' lives in that they may be thinking a little bit differently about how they treat their patients that they see every day.