Stress is one of the major factors that determines whether a person will get heart disease.

LEWISTON – A grandmother from Fayette wanted to know how to stay calm and avoid stress when she’s around her grandchildren.

Irene Martin, who has 10 grandchildren, was able to get direct advice from a nationally known fitness guru thanks to a live telecast brought Thursday into the Central Maine Heart and Vascular Institute.

The institute sponsored “Take Heart: A Life-Changing Approach to Heart Health for Women” as part of its efforts to inform women of their risks for getting heart disease. The telecast, which was broadcast live from Dallas via satellite, was seen in five sites in Maine and at least 28 other sites across the country.

Martin drove into Lewiston after reading about the telecast so that she could take advantage of the free screening provided earlier that evening. Martin said she felt reassured after learning that she had about a 2 percent chance of getting heart disease in the next 10 years.

Kathy Smith, president of Kathy Smith Lifestyles in Los Angeles, suggested to Martin that she perform simple deep breathing exercises regularly. Experts speaking Thursday noted that stress is one major factor for heart disease risk, long thought to be primarily a male occurrence.

“My husband and I are pretty active,” said Martin. “But sometimes we get so busy with the grandkids. I think this breathing thing really does work.”

Besides stress levels, other factors cited were family history, smoking habits, cholesterol levels, blood pressure, weight and level of physical activity.

Women receiving the free screenings answered about 20 questions and then received a computerized analysis of the likeliness of getting some kind of cardiovascular disease.

Karen Shaw, who works at the hospital, said she underwent the screening because of a history of heart disease in her family. Both of her parents had suffered from heart attacks so Shaw wanted to know what she could do to prevent the same outcome for herself.

“I learned a lot of little things that I could do to improve my health,” said Shaw. “I really don’t like fish, and I found out that flax seeds or walnuts were just as good as eating fish.”

Expert information came from Smith, as well as Kathy Kastan, president of WomenHeart, and Dr. C. Noel Bairey Merz, medical director for Women’s Health at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles.

All of the experts stressed that women show different symptoms than men when it comes to heart problems. Fatigue, sleeplessness and indigestion can signal problems that are often attributed to other causes, said Kastan, who underwent bypass surgery after being misdiagnosed by two different cardiologists.

The primary goal of Thursday’s event was to educate women about heart disease, said Pam Hageny, who coordinated the telecast among the sites in Lewiston, Augusta, Farmington, Brunswick and Rumford. Because of the common perception that mostly men suffer from heart disease, few people know that it, along with strokes, actually cause death in 50 percent of women, said Hageny.

Other statistics Hageny cited from the American Heart Foundation was that 83 percent of women have one or more risk factors, and that more women than men die from heart disease each year.

The institute was able to provide the telecast because of a $10,000 grant from the pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, said Hageny. The goal is to disseminate information and provide more free screenings in the central Maine region during the national heart month of February, said Hageny.


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