Lori Sepich smoked for years and sometimes skipped taking her blood pressure medicine. But she never thought she’d have a heart attack.
The possibility “just wasn’t registering with me,” said the 64-year-old from Memphis, Tennessee, who suffered two of them 13 years apart.
She’s far from alone. More than 60 million women in the U.S. live with cardiovascular disease, which includes heart disease as well as stroke, heart failure and atrial fibrillation. And despite the myth that heart attacks mostly strike men, women are vulnerable too.
Overall in the U.S., 1 in 5 women dies of cardiovascular disease each year, 37,000 of them from heart attacks.
Cardiovascular disease is “the No. 1 killer of women. It will affect you or someone you know,” said Dr. Sharonne Hayes, a cardiologist at the…