Kendra Hance went to an executive breakfast before the Sister to Sister health fair in Washington last year strictly as part of her job. She worked for CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield, a sponsor of the event that spotlights heart disease in women.
As long as she was there, the Woodlawn resident figured, she'd get a free heart health screening. What she learned in that routine procedure changed her life.
Her blood pressure was high, and she was urged to follow up with her doctor. The diagnosis: Hance was on the verge of developing diabetes if she didn't lose at least 30 pounds from her 5-foot-4-inch, 186-pound frame.
A year later, as the 2005 Sister to Sister fair takes place today in 12 cities -- including, for the first time, Baltimore -- Hance, 31, has lost more than 50 pounds, has normal cholesterol and blood pressure and makes quarterly visits to the doctor. And she's urging women to attend the free health fair.
"I never thought it could be me being given a death sentence," she said.
The health fairs are sponsored by Sister to Sister: Everyone Has a Heart Foundation, a nonprofit organization founded five years ago by social worker Irene Pollin, wife of Washington sports team owner Abe Pollin, to help women prevent heart disease. In the six cities where 15,000 women attended Sister to Sister fairs last year, more than a third of those screened learned they were at risk.
That's not surprising to Celia Maxwell. Despite news reports several years ago that heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women and that symptoms of it can be more subtle in women than in men, many haven't gotten the message, she said.
"The level of concern definitely isn't where it needs to be," said Maxwell, assistant vice president for health sciences at Howard University and a Sister to Sister board member.
Recent research shows that doctors have a way to go in recognizing warning signs in female patients. A study published this month in Circulation, the journal of the American Heart Association, found that doctors given sample patient profiles often classified a woman's risk for heart disease as lower than a man's when the risk was, in fact, the same.
"This recent research really points to the need for women to empower themselves and know their personal level of risk for heart disease," said Lori Mosca, director of preventive cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, who led the study. "It's important that women don't assume that they have been screened adequately for heart disease."
