It’s staggering to think back on how recently women and their hearts began to be taken seriously by the scientific community. As legendary Emory cardiologist Nanette Wenger, MD, wrote in a 2016 American College of Cardiology article: “Although heart disease is the number one killer of women, cardiovascular disease was really thought of as a man’s disease until the last few decades.” 

In the not-so-distant past, Wenger added, “Women who came into the emergency room with chest pains were told they had a stomach problem or that they were imagining the pain and had emotional problems, so they were sent home.” 

Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD

Thankfully, following down the path first carved out by pioneers like Wenger, researchers and physicians like Viola Vaccarino, MD, PhD, have continued to build a data-backed case for the fact that women are very much not just making things up. 

Vaccarino, the Wilton Looney Professor of Cardiovascular Research at Rollins School of Public Health’s Department of Epidemiology and faculty member in the Division of Cardiology, is the principal investigator of a prospective study funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) looking at sex differences in bodily responses to mental stress and subsequent cardiovascular events among young and middle-aged patients who survived a heart attack at Emory University.  

A resulting paper focusing on the reactivity of small vessels to stress, published earlier this month in the journal Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis, and Vascular Biology, will be one of two articles featured in the AHA Journal’s April 2023 issue. 

Samaah Sullivan, PhD

Samaah Sullivan, PhD, the first author of the paper, now at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, was a postdoctoral fellow at Emory University working with Vaccarino when she embraced this research. With these latest findings, Sullivan, Vaccarino and their co-authors — including Emory cardiologists Puja Mehta,…