EmpowHer:
Dr. Nieca Goldberg:
C-reactive protein is an additional marker that we evaluate for women who appear to have risk for heart disease without any of the obvious risk factors like diabetes or high cholesterol or high blood pressure, being overweight, smoking or lack of exercise.
Sometimes there are women who either have heart disease without an obvious reason or have a family history where the risk for the heart disease is unknown. So what we do is measure additional factors, one of which is the C-reactive protein that measures inflammation.
Inflammation is now emerging, chronic levels of inflammation are now emerging as a risk marker for heart disease. It’s not an official risk factor like high cholesterol yet, it just marks increased risk for heart disease and we find that often times there are women who have seemingly normal cholesterol but have a high level of CRP, the cardiac CRP test, and those women have a 21 percet higher risk of having a heart attack than women who don’t have an elevated CRP.
Nieca Goldberg M.D., cardiologist, author of the award winning book "Women Are Not Small Men: Life Saving Strategies for Preventing and Healing Heart Disease," recently started her own practice "Total Heart Care" in Manhattan. She is the former Chief of the Cardiac Rehabilitation and Prevention Center at Lenox Hill Hospital and a national spokesperson for the American Heart Association.
During her time at Lenox Hill, Dr. Goldberg founded the "Women's Heart Program," the only cardiac rehabilitation and prevention program for women in New York City.
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