Tuesday, December 27, 2011

BPA and the Female Heart

BPA, or bisphenol A, is one of the components in hard, clear plastic -- those ubiquitous refillable water bottles and baby bottles, as well as in the linings of canned foods.

Now researchers at the University of Cincinnati, in an NIH-funded study, have shown that BPA affects female hearts: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/337035/title/BPA_sends_false_signals_to_female_hearts

What struck me is that the researchers are calling this a "gender-specific vulnerability to arrhythmias."

I'm hoping that this is a positive development in researchers realizing that males and females are not identical and research that just includes males is not automatically applicable to females.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Pro Heart, Pro Holiday

I'm still at the stage where it's absolutely thrilling to see my name and story in print; hopefully I'll never get so jaded that I become blase about these things.

Bayer has a website called I Am Pro Heart, aiming to educate women about heart disease. There is, of course, a profit motive too; Bayer sells aspirin, and daily aspirin is often recommended for patients who've already had a heart attack or stroke.

There's also a large gallery of patient stories on the site and a link for you to submit your own heart survivor story.

This is mine. I sent it in several months ago and for a few weeks was checking the site every day to see if it showed up. It never did, so I eventually quit looking. I went back to the site today for something else, and there it was. Yay!

So this post isn't *entirely* (just mostly) navel-gazing and me-me-me, I'm going to provide a link to my fellow WomenHeart Champion Carolyn's wonderful HeartSisters blog. Carolyn always has useful, interesting things to say and if you're not reading her blog, you're missing out.

Since it's December, I'm linking to her excellent piece, Best Gifts for Heart Patients. If you have someone on your holiday list who's a heart disease survivor and you're not sure what might make a good gift, check out Carolyn's excellent suggestions.