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Barbra Streisand endows program at
Cedars-Sinai Women’s Heart Center
Newswise — A bold new resource for women’s heart health, The
Barbra Streisand Women’s Cardiovascular
Research and Education Program at
Cedars-Sinai, has been created with a
philanthropic gift of $5 million.
The gift brings to nearly $16 million the money raised from
her recent concert tours she has directed to
charitable distribution in the areas of
education, the environment, women’s health,
and other key civic concerns.
“Cardiovascular disease is the leading killer of women,” says
Eduardo Marbán, MD, PhD, director at the
Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute. “It kills
nearly 500,000 women in the U.S. each year,
more than all cancers combined.
"The medical system has failed to recognize female-pattern
heart attack symptoms; current testing and
treatments are geared toward male
physiology.”
Ms. Streisand, who has contributed to women’s health programs
through the Streisand Foundation since 1986,
explained: “Women need to be educated about
female cardiovascular disease, and the
medical community must be propelled toward
change. Just like with breast cancer, the
impetus must come from women themselves
striving to become empowered to reduce their
risks for heart disease.”
Streisand’s endowment will provide permanent funding for
research and education at the Cedars-Sinai
Women’s Heart Center, which will empower
women with vital information about female
cardiovascular disease and raise awareness
of the disease within the medical community.
It will expand current and future research efforts and create
breakthrough diagnostics, treatments and
technologies. It will facilitate better
understanding of gender differences in heart
disease, with the aim of improving treatment
options for women at risk for, or suffering
from heart disease.
The endowment supports the work of C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD,
director of the Women’s Heart Center at
Cedars-Sinai and holder of the Women’s Guild
Chair in Women’s Health and is organized
around the five frontiers of women’s
cardiovascular research:
o Ending cardiac death in women through early detection
o Advancing new treatments for microvascular
coronary dysfunction, an often deadly
disorder primarily affecting women
o Identifying gender-specific genes and proteins that
increase or reduce the risk of heart disease
in women
o Conducting clinical trials of promising
new drugs for women
o Understanding how to harness nutrition,
exercise, and stress management to reduce
heart disease in women
Even physicians do not fully appreciate the degree to which
women are at risk for heart disease. Most
are insufficiently aware that a woman having
a heart attack is 20 percent more likely to
die from it than a man.
Dr. Bairey Merz urges that “It must become a top priority on
the national medical agenda to make testing,
diagnosis and treatments more relevant to
female physiology. We are thrilled Ms.
Streisand has chosen to make women’s heart
health a priority of her philanthropic
giving.”
She goes on to explain: “As an endowment, funding for the
dissemination of education -- both among
women and within the medical community --
and research into relevant testing and
treatments can continue, not just for the
immediate future, but for generations to
come.”
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