It’s October — the month where pink ribbons are a mainstay on cereal boxes, when corporations and sorority girls line up in droves and run around the Lakefill in support of breast cancer research. The killer takes almost 40,000 women each year and will strike one in eight women in their lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society.
It’s a devastating disease, as many women and families could tell you better than I can. However many more women can tell you about the effects of heart disease — at least, the ones who live to tell the tale.
Actually heart disease claims ten times more women every year than breast cancer, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
Don’t get me wrong. I have the greatest respect for anyone who has suffered through breast cancer. I was one of those sorority girls participating in Sunday’s Walk for Hope. And until some thug broke into my car a few weekends ago, I owned several books of checks with pink ribbons on them.
Although I’m happy to support other women’s causes, I just wish there was a public outlet to do the same for a disease that hits closer to home for me — heart disease.
I just wish that, like all those people who walk in honor of people who have suffered from breast cancer, I could similarly contribute to awareness of heart disease, which could have claimed the life of someone in my family. Fortunately that close relative recovered from his 1991 heart attack, but many more people and families are not so lucky.
Heart attacks are surrounded by the myth that they only happen to men. That idea has perpetuated itself in my life. Although a doctor who knew of our family history ordered my brother to be tested for high cholesterol, I received no such advice on early prevention. In fact the same year my brother received his first test was when a doctor showed me how to do a breast self-examination. But considering how I have no family history of breast cancer, my doctor should have been thinking about that cholesterol test first.
Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine received a $13.8 million grant to study breast cancer prevention and an $11.4 million grant for prostate cancer prevention research. In contrast NU has received no notable research grant to investigate heart disease.
Breast cancer hasn’t always seen such public support. Cancer used to be stigmatized the way mental illness and, to some degree, AIDS, are today. The construction of specialized cancer centers in the ’50s went a long way toward erasing stigma and increasing research support.
A similar increase in funding for heart disease research could ensure that more men and women know about this important issue. This money should not come out of the funding that already goes to breast cancer. In fact breast cancer activists need to be more viligant than ever to ensure that corporate support for research and activism does not dissappear before a victory is won.
But I’m not holding my breath either way. After all, aren’t a woman’s breasts always more important than her heart?
