ARTICLE SUMMARY:
Despite the prominent role that women play in both society and healthcare today, they have historically been underrepresented in all facets of the study and treatment of cardiovascular disease. A roundtable of experts discusses how serious the problem is and what can and should be done next.
It’s a topic that has been all but ignored for years but is now emerging as a major issue for a wide range of constituencies in healthcare: the relative lack of attention or focus that women receive around cardiovascular disease. As one journal article put it, women are “understudied, underrecognized, underdiagnosed, undertreated, and underrepresented in clinical trials.” The implications are enormous not just for physicians and others in the clinical community, but also for policy experts, medical device companies, and the investors who back them to bring new devices to market.
At April’s MedTech Strategist Innovation Summit 2024 in Dublin, Caroline Gaynor, who is a Trinity College alum and partner at Lightstone Ventures in Dublin, assembled and led a panel discussion among a diverse group representing the wide range of interest in this subject: Elizabeth Comen, MD, is a breast oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York and the author of the book All in Her Head; Peggy Maguire is director general of the European Institute for Women's Health; Georgina Murphy, PhD, is an investment director with the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund (ISIF); and Navin Kapur, MD, is an interventional cardiologist and heart failure specialist at Tufts Medical Center in Boston.
