Only about half of women would call 911 if they thought they were having a heart attack, according to a new survey commissioned by the American Heart Association. The poll found that more women than in 1997 correctly identified heart disease as the leading killer of women, but that awareness varies among ethnic and racial groups.
Dr. Lori Mosca of Columbia University Medical Center and her colleagues say that a telephone survey of more than 1,100 randomly selected women showed that 60 percent of white women said heart disease was the leading killer of women, compared with 43 percent of African-American women, 44 percent of Hispanic women, and 34 percent of Asian women. A third of women who were 25 to 34 years old picked breast cancer as the biggest threat to women’s health.
Overall, 53 percent of women said they would call 911 if they felt heart attack symptoms. About the same proportion of women recognized chest, neck, shoulder, and arm pain as possible signs of a heart attack in women, but fewer than a third cited another symptom, shortness of breath, as a cause for alarm. About half said family caregiving responsibilities kept them from taking longer-term steps to prevent heart disease, such as checking their blood pressure, managing stress, or seeing their doctors.
BOTTOM LINE: Awareness of heart disease as the leading killer of women has almost doubled since 1997, but gaps persist among ethnic groups. Only about half of women know the symptoms of a heart attack and would call 911 if they thought they were having one.
CAUTIONS: The survey respondents were relatively well-educated, so their answers may represent higher awareness than among women in general. The margin of error was about 2 percent.
WHERE TO FIND IT: Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, March
Phone calls and cancer screening
Only about 60 percent of people age 50 and over are regularly screened for colorectal cancer. Dr. Steven Simon led a team from Harvard Pilgrim Health Care and Harvard Medical School that tested an automated telephone outreach system designed to encourage people over 50 to contact their primary-care providers to schedule screening. They randomly assigned half of almost 21,000 members of Massachusetts-based Harvard Pilgrim to receive a single phone call in addition to the usual doctor’s advice during routine visits. The phone system used voice recognition software to tailor its information to patients’ responses about previous screening, family history, or concerns about discomfort.After one year, the researchers looked at how many people had one of four screening tests: fecal occult blood testing, double-contrast barium enema, flexible sigmoidoscopy, or colonoscopy. After two years, they tracked who had colonoscopies. They found no significant differences among the two groups: Three out of 10 patients in each group had some kind of screening. Slightly more people - just over 2 out of 10 - in the telephone outreach group had colonoscopies in the second year than in the usual care group, but the difference was not statistically significant.
“Colorectal cancer screening may be among a set of challenging conditions that are resistant to this type of intervention,’’ the researchers said.
BOTTOM LINE: An automated telephone outreach system did not improve rates of colorectal cancer screening.
CAUTIONS: The telephone outreach system successfully contacted only 61 percent of eligible patients, so results might have been different if more patients had been reached.
WHERE TO FIND IT: Archives of Internal Medicine, Feb. 8
ELIZABETH COONEY 
