Heart disease affects men and women in different ways. In women, symptoms of burgeoning heart disease are often more insidious, but when a heart attack strikes, it is more lethal than it is in men. Roughly 25 percent of men will die within a year of their first heart attack, but among women, 38 percent will die. Women are twice as likely as men to have a second heart attack within 6 years of their first one, and women are twice as likely as men to die after bypass surgery. Yet after a heart attack, women’s hearts are more likely to maintain their systolic function—their ability to contract and pump blood from the chambers into the arteries. According to C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, Director of the Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, this suggests that heart disease manifests differently in women, affecting the microvasculature (small blood vessels) instead of the macrovasculature (major blood vessels) as it does in men.

This activity is part of the ConnectED Learning: Depression curriculum. Primary care providers encounter depressed patients every clinic day. How can a busy practitioner make the important distinctions among these patients: who will respond, to what treatment; and who needs specialty care (psychotherapy and/or medication management)? This session will present a model for recognizing subtypes, especially the mixed sub-type, with an emphasis on using this knowledge to direct management in order to improve outcomes and reduce iatrogenic risk.

The incidence and prevalence of prediabetes and Type II Diabetes Mellitus in adolescents and young adults has increased over the past decade. A recent cross-sectional study of 12 years of NHANES data suggests that this population has an associated increased cardiometabolic risk. Listen as our team discusses these findings and some prevention strategies to help improve health outcomes.