ABSTRACT
For decades, cardiovascular disease (CVD) has been the leading cause of death and disability for both men and women in the United States. A woman’s risk of having a cardiac event significantly increases after she goes through menopause. This is because of her gradual loss of heart-protective estrogen. As a woman ages, she tends to experience a greater increase in lipid levels, high blood pressure, weight gain, and hormonal imbalance. Women with high blood pressure are much more prone to diastolic dysfunction (DD), a condition involving progressive stiffening of the heart muscle that weakens the left ventricle’s pumping ability. It can lead to the most common and serious form of heart failure that affects women. Shortness of breath in a hypertensive woman frequently suggests that she has DD and because standard medicine has no effective treatment over time DD may progress to diastolic heart failure.
