Women’s Heart Center
About Our Women’s Heart Health Services
The Women’s Heart Center is a multidisciplinary collaboration between Lahey Hospital & Medical Center and Winchester Hospital funded by the Telemachus and Irene Demoulas Family Foundation. The Women’s Heart Center provides individualized and comprehensive care for women with heart disease or at risk for heart disease in the future.
A woman’s heart is different than a man’s heart. Some conditions like micro-vascular angina, broken heart syndrome, spontaneous coronary artery dissection and postpartum cardiomyopathy occur mostly or only in women. This specialized center helps women of all ages reduce their chances of heart disease and its complications through a preventive and personalized, guideline-centered management approach, including state-of-the-art screening, testing and treatment. The Center is designed to prevent and manage the full spectrum of female cardiovascular conditions. The Center is dedicated to raising awareness about women’s heart health and using innovative scientific research to bridge the sex-based differences in cardiovascular diseases.
The Women’s Heart Center has a multidisciplinary team of providers encompassing multiple medical and surgical specialists, with expertise in preventive cardiology, coronary artery disease, heart failure, arrhythmia, valve disease, vascular disease, cardio-oncology and pregnancy related cardiac conditions. The provider team also include nutritionists, behavioral health specialists, pharmacists and exercise physiologists. The Center provides convenient access to all of Lahey Hospital & Medical Center and Winchester Hospital’s diagnostic and treatment facilities for heart disease.
Meet the Women’s Heart Center Team
The Women’s Heart Center has a multidisciplinary team of providers encompassing multiple medical and surgical specialists, with expertise in preventive cardiology, coronary artery disease, heart failure, arrhythmia, valve disease, vascular disease, cardio-oncology and pregnancy related cardiac conditions. The provider team also include nutritionists, behavioral health specialists, pharmacists and exercise physiologists. The Center provides convenient access to all of Lahey Hospital & Medical Center and Winchester Hospital’s diagnostic and treatment facilities for heart disease.
- Dr. Danya Dinwoodey, Women’s Heart Disease
- Dr. Sarju Ganatra, Cardio-Oncology
- Dr. Jessica Mintz, Women’s Vascular Disease
- Dr. Florence M. Parrella, Cardiac Electrophysiology
What We Treat
- Chest pain with normal coronary arteries / Coronary microvascular dysfunction / Microvascular angina / Cardiac syndrome X
- Vasospastic angina
- Spontaneous coronary artery dissection
- Pregnancy and heart disease
- Broken heart syndrome / Takotsubo cardiomyopathy / Stress induced cardiomyopathy
- Diastolic heart failure / Heart failure with preserved ejection fraction
- Venous thromboembolism / Pulmonary embolism / Deep venous thrombosis
- Fibromuscular dysplasia
- Family history of heart disease
- High cholesterol
- High blood pressure
- Risk biomarkers such as lipoprotein (a) [Lp(a)]
- Adverse pregnancy outcomes such as hypertension, gestational diabetes, small for gestational age, placental abruption, pregnancy loss, intrauterine growth retardation or preterm delivery
- Rheumatologic disease
- Diabetes
- Obesity
- Polycystic ovarian syndrome (PCOS)
- Premature menopause
- Hormone therapy
- History of cancer treatments
Services Offered at the Women’s Heart Center
The Center can identify and treat women who may have heart disease or be at increased risk of heart disease due to treatment with radiation and chemotherapy.
Each new patient completes a risk assessment questionnaire and clinical assessment. When indicated, additional testing may be performed.
Risk factors that affect both sexes are considered as well as those specific to women such as premature menopause, hormone therapy and pregnancy-related conditions.
Women who experience domestic abuse may be more likely to develop heart disease, stroke and type 2 diabetes. Despite the high cardiovascular disease risk for survivors and a recognized need for education, screening and prevention efforts, there are no cardiovascular health resources currently available to survivors of domestic violence. The Lahey Women’s Heart Center in partnership with Saheli, a Burlington based nonprofit community organization for domestic violence survivors, designed this program for raising awareness about women’s heart health, for cardiovascular screening among the women survivors of domestic violence and for establishing clinical care for those survivors with positive screening by engaging Tufts University School of Medicine students and faculty in a community driven effort.
Women are enrolled within six months after delivery with adverse pregnancy outcomes such as hypertension, gestational diabetes, small for gestational age, placental abruption, pregnancy loss, intrauterine growth retardation or preterm delivery for long term follow-up in collaboration with Winchester Hospital obstetricians and maternal-fetal medicine specialists.
For over 30 years, cardiovascular disease has been recognized to affect men and women differently. These differences exist in disease biology, disease presentation and treatment responses. Certain cardiovascular conditions affect women predominantly. About 80-90% of these patients are women. Unfortunately, there is minimal to no scientific understanding of the biologic basis for these conditions. How do these diseases develop? Why do they affect women more than men? What is the best treatment for them? All these questions remain to be answered. Most importantly, these questions must be answered to improve symptom burden and decrease mortality for patients with cardiovascular disease.
To advance our understanding of female biased cardiovascular diseases and deliver world class care for women with cardiovascular disease, we established the Women’s Heart Center at Lahey Hospital in 2021. In our Center, we designed a multi-institutional collaborative research program. We are creating a next-generation, prospective Lahey cohort of women biased cardiovascular conditions to advance the field. A cohort where we genotype, perform transcriptomics and biobank samples to understand the origins of sex differences in cardiovascular disease. The goal of the cohort is to understand the genesis of sex differences in cardiovascular disease by diving deep into the details of a patient’s biology and environment. Understanding the associations of biology and the environment with cardiovascular disease at this granular level will be transformative and lead to new diagnostic and treatment approaches.
The Center offers lifestyle modification programs aimed at reducing cardiovascular risk in women. Programs include an Exercise/Rehabilitation program, Nutritional Counselling, Behavioral Health Services and Smoking Cessation.
The Center provides care for women with or at high risk for heart disease who have menopausal symptoms or are considering the use of hormonal contraceptives or treatments.
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For BILH Providers, EPIC order: Ambulatory Referral to Women’s Cardiovascular Health Program [Order Type: Referral, Preference list: Amb Facility Referrals and Px Code: REF 191]
