Associate feature: For too long heart disease has been perceived as a male problem

Despite coronary heart disease killing nearly three times as many women as breast cancer in Scotland, women are often more concerned about their breast cancer risk.

And across every stage of their medical journey, women with heart disease can face disadvantages.

Whether it’s a lack of awareness, underdiagnosis or not receiving the optimal treatment and care, more needs to be done to support women with heart disease.

The lack of awareness of heart disease in women means that many women are dying needlessly from heart attacks because they are not recognising symptoms or are delaying seeking medical help, reducing their chances of survival.

Action is needed to encourage and empower women to understand their risk and seek help when they experience symptoms.

But we must also address how we support the women who seek medical support. This starts with diagnosis.

Research has shown that tests and tools currently used do not always provide accurate diagnosis of heart attacks in women.

There is also evidence that women don’t receive the same standard of treatment and care as men when they are diagnosed.

Whilst many differences can appear small in isolation, we see that these add up across the entire pathway of care to create significant gender gaps in the treatment of heart disease.

Decades of research is showing us how these tools and pathways can be set up to better identify

heart disease in women. It is crucial that our NHS quickly adapts to this evidence and ensures that cardiac services are designed to diagnose heart disease equally for everyone.

We must all act now to make sure that gender does not define the treatment of heart disease.

Katie MacGregor is policy and public affairs officer at British Heart Foundation (BHF) Scotland. This article was sponsored by BHF Scotland