Pop quiz: What disease are elderly women most at risk for developing? If you said "breast cancer," you're like most women--and you're wrong. A new study shows that women are severely uninformed about the health concerns that they face, and that may put them in danger.
Coronary heart disease is actually the leading cause of mortality among women aged 65 and older. In fact, women over 65 are much more likely to die of heart disease than men in the same age group. But of 200 women surveyed by Sara Wilcox, Ph.D., only 45% reported believing this to be true. Of older women, the ones most likely to develop this disease, only 34% responded that this was true.
"Heart disease has historically been viewed as a 'man's disease' by the lay and medical communities," says Wilcox, an assistant professor of exercise science in the School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina. "The image of heart disease as a women's issue has not been widely portrayed in the media, perhaps because it is more a disease of older women."
Media attention to breast cancer, however, has grown. This may explain Wilcox's finding that 58% of respondents identified breast cancer as the leading cause of cancer death for women ages 55 to 64, and 44% deemed it the main cause of cancer death for women 65 to 74, even though the true culprit for both age groups is lung cancer. (Breast cancer does cause the most cancer deaths for women ages 45 to 54.)
