For American Heart Month, Bassett Medical Center hosted a vendor fair and speaker program Thursday, Feb. 5 to amplify heart education and emphasize women’s heart health.
The vendor fair took place in the morning in the Fieldstone Building lobby, as part of its “Go Red” events, with displays from Bassett cardiovascular professionals and heart device vendors like Medtronic and Watchman.
Emily Ann Feldman, a registered nurse who works primarily in education as an instructor for the American Heart Association, demonstrated hands-only CPR technique and the use of an automated external defibrillator.
She also spoke about the AHA has found women who suffered cardiac arrest outside of the hospital were less likely to survive, as people tend to be uncomfortable with female breasts or bras.
“They don’t feel comfortable, so they do nothing,” Feldman said. “Then the woman ends up suffering.”
She said CPR works exactly the same on a woman as it does on men, and put bras on the manikins she was using to demonstrate CPR.
The 2025 AHA guidelines stated that somebody performing CPR can leave the bra in place, Feldman said. If using an AED, she said, a person needs to move the strap or band of the bra out of the way. It is most important to ensure there is nothing between the pads and the skin, she said.
For every one minute that passes during a cardiac arrest and no action is taken, Feldman said, a person’s chances of survival decrease by 10%.
“It’s a really important skill,” Feldman said. “You never know where it is going to happen or to who, and every minute counts.”
JoAnn Vass, the stroke coordinator for Bassett Medical Center, said stroke and heart disease are directly related to one another, adding that stroke symptoms and causes, like high blood pressure. can be treated. Bassett is a rural stroke center, Vass said, so it is especially important to seek early stroke treatment.
Some patients live about an hour away from Bassett Medical Center, she added. Vass said the center sees about 220 to 250 stroke patients a year, but bigger centers tend to see hundreds more.
“Now that we have better treatment for strokes, hopefully we are preventing strokes from happening,” Vass said.
Speaker program
Holly Cassella, service line director for cardiovascular, respiratory, and medicine services at Bassett Healthcare Network, said at the start of the speaker program that she performed CPR on a friend when she was 13 years old. While she had no formal training and alternated between compressions and breaths more often than she probably should have, she was able to save her friend’s life.
Dr. Anjali Prakash, a cardiology fellow at Bassett, addressed patterns in health care in which women experiencing heart attack symptoms can be overlooked.
Prakash said that for her, the cause is personal. One of the main reasons she chose cardiology as a specialty was because she was continuously seeing “women’s symptoms being misunderstood, minimized or ignored,” she said.
Cardiovascular disease is the No. 1 cause of death for women in the United States, Prakash said, killing more women annually than breast cancer, lung cancer and ovarian cancer combined.
Many women do not recognize the warning signs of heart attacks and, as a result, will often show up to the hospital after significant damage is done, Prakash said.
Women do not always present with what individuals are taught is typical cardiac chest pain, she added. For decades, education was based on medical trials from the early 1900s — which described chest pain, sweating and collapse as common symptoms — but included almost exclusively men, Prakash said.
Women are more likely to experience heart attack symptoms like shortness of breath, fatigue, nausea, jaw or back pain, lightheadedness or a “sense that something isn’t right,” Prakash said. These symptoms are commonly labeled as anxiety, acid reflux, stress or musculoskeletal pain, she added.
Another myth, Prakash said, people believe is that women are fully protected from heart disease before menopause due to estrogen. While estrogen offers “some early protection,” Prakash said, it does not lead to immunity.
The program also saw speeches from Heather Evans, executive director for the American Heart Association in Central New York, and Staci Thompson, president and CEO of Bassett Healthcare Network.
“We need to encourage more women to pursue cardiology and support them once they are here,” Prakash said. “We need medical providers that reflect all of the patients that they take care of. Diversity doesn’t dilute science. It strengthens it.”