February is a great time to \u2764\ufe0f your heart.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no coincidence that our major life-giving organ shares the same anatomically incorrect symbol<\/a> as our impulse to form meaningful relationships.<\/p>\n Love and friendship \u2014 and the support they come with \u2014 actually have an impact on heart health.<\/p>\n \u201cLove improves your health because if you have emotional support, you do better physically and mentally, no matter who you love and bring with you through your journey,\u201d says Colleen Norris<\/a>, a leading heart researcher at the University of Alberta.<\/p>\n In celebration of Heart Month<\/a>, Wear Red Canada Day<\/a> and Valentine\u2019s Day, Folio asked Norris to help us count the ways love improves heart health.<\/p>\n Love means friendship<\/p>\n Norris notes that the person who loves you doesn\u2019t have to be your spouse.<\/p>\n \u201cOur results consistently demonstrate that men experience better outcomes when they are married,\u201d she points out. \u201cFor women, they have better outcomes when they report strong social support from friends or sisters or daughters.\u201d<\/p>\n Research by Norris and others<\/a> shows that health-related quality of life is lower for women than for men one year following treatment for coronary artery disease, and a big factor in that is social isolation. Women with less social support are more prone to depression and less likely to follow their medication and treatment plans. Conversely, social support reduces psychological distress and enhances recovery.<\/p>\n \u201cThe evidence says women do better if they have a friend or a daughter or a sister \u2014 the person you go to first \u2014 and it doesn\u2019t have to be their husband,\u201d says Norris.<\/p>\n Norris points out that heart disease can even put a strain on a marriage if you only rely on your spouse for support.<\/p>\n \u201cIt sure is not going to improve your relationship, because both of you will feel it\u2019s unfair \u2014 for one of you, it\u2019s that you got sick and for the other, it\u2019s that you have to turn your life over to taking care of your partner.\u201d<\/p>\n For Norris, when she wound up in an emergency department with chest pain last year, one of her go-to people was a friend she\u2019s known since Grade 1.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s that shared history, that bond we have. She\u2019s a person I call if something disastrous happens in my life,\u201d Norris explains. \u201cI just say, \u2018Kath, you\u2019ll never believe what happened!\u2019 and we can have that conversation without any judgment.\u201d<\/p>\n Norris and others use a tool called the Medical Outcomes Social Support Index<\/a> in their research to capture all of the benefits that different kinds of relationships can bring to our health: emotional support (someone to listen to you), tangible help (with meals and chores), affection (someone to give you a hug) and positive social interactions (fun).<\/p>\n Love means support<\/p>\n Along with clinical guidelines for medications, diet and lifestyle changes, nursing practice has been updated in recent years to pay more attention to the intangible factors that contribute to illness and recovery.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why Norris counsels clinicians to ask heart patients, \u201cWho\u2019s your person? Do you have someone who provides you with support, who can get you to hospital, who you can talk to about this?\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cIf someone is coming in to hospital alone and no one’s coming to visit them, we can’t just send them home with all their meds for heart disease because they’re going to be back,\u201d says Norris, who last year was awarded the King Charles III Coronation Medal by the Heart & Stroke Foundation<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not doing our job if we don’t say, \u2018Do you want to talk to someone here while you\u2019re here? How can we improve your social support?\u2019 Because if you\u2019re going home alone, you\u2019re coming back again.\u201d<\/p>\n Love means balance<\/p>\n Stress is a top risk for heart disease, especially for women, yet none of the clinicians asked Norris about her mental health throughout her time at the hospital. She has since sought counselling to better manage her stress.<\/p>\n \u201cI exercise. I don\u2019t eat junk food. I don\u2019t smoke. And I ended up with chest pain,\u201d she recalls. \u201cIt was stress.\u201d<\/p>\n Caring for aging parents is just one of the roles that often falls to women, creating a gender imbalance that is dangerous for heart health, says Norris. In fact, her research shows that your gendered roles have more to do with heart outcomes than your sex<\/a>.<\/p>\n Her team evaluated factors such as marital status, parenting or caregiving, income and time spent on housework. Those who scored high on behaviours typically ascribed to women \u2014 whether they were male or female \u2014 were much more likely to have a poorer recovery.<\/p>\n \u201cIt didn\u2019t matter if you were a man or a woman, if you had a high score on the gender index, you were four times as likely to come back with a second heart event within the first year,\u201d Norris says.<\/p>\n Gendered roles like cleaning, making meals and caring for children can become ingrained patterns in our relationships and are therefore hard to change, Norris points out. That\u2019s why she has a beef with heart health campaigns<\/a> stating that 80 to 90 per cent of cardiovascular disease is preventable.<\/p>\n She\u2019s also skeptical about research that looks to include intimate partners in joint cardiac rehabilitation programs<\/a>, simply because men and women have such different needs when it comes to followup.<\/p>\n Love means better care<\/p>\n \u201cIf we truly want to improve the health of women, we have to look at the person sitting in front of us,\u201d Norris concludes. \u201cReally doing person-centred, tailored care is a way that we get things like love to improve your heart health and your mental health.\u201d<\/p>\n Heart disease shows up differently in men than in women. Men tend to get blockages in arteries, whereas women get damage to the vascular system. So it\u2019s no surprise that the appropriate treatments are also different.<\/p>\n From Norris\u2019s perspective, the ovaries are the architects of women\u2019s health<\/a>, and that holds true long after menopause, when the lack of hormones such as estrogen and progesterone takes a toll on everything from bones to sleep to heart health.<\/p>\n She\u2019s pleased to see research that once cautioned against using hormone replacement therapy has now been debunked<\/a>. Individualized care could look like prescribing hormones or other supplements, or identifying heart meds that work well with your other medications, for example.<\/p>\n Norris has teamed up with the Alberta Women\u2019s Health Foundation<\/a> to throw the third annual Gala-entines event for 350 people<\/a> at Fort Edmonton as part of this year\u2019s Wear Red Canada efforts to inform women about their risks.<\/p>\n \u201cBring your women friends, love yourself and tell each other about heart health,\u201d Norris says. \u201cStart spreading the news.\u201d<\/p>\n Colleen Norris is a professor and associate dean of research in the Faculty of Nursing<\/a> and Cavarzan Chair in Mature Women\u2019s Health Research. She holds adjunct appointments in the cardiology<\/a> and obstetrics and gynecology<\/a> in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry<\/a>, and in the School of Public Health<\/a>, and is a member of the Women and Children\u2019s Health Research Institute<\/a> at the U of A.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"February is a great time to \u2764\ufe0f your heart. 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