How Cardiac MRI Aids in the Diagnosis of Heart Disease in Women

For women in particular, cardiac MRI helps achieve diagnosis and further guide management of treatment in patients with heart disease. Women are often misdiagnosed, and the trend of their misdiagnosis has contributed to rising cardiac deaths among their patient population.

“It’s been documented that women are much more likely to die or have complications from heart disease because it’s unrecognized,” says Karen Ordovas, MD, MAS, director of Cardiac Imaging in the UC San Francisco Department of Radiology and Biomedical Imaging. “They are more likely to be misdiagnosed and under treated. If you have a female that shows up to an emergency room with chest pain, she is more likely to be judged not to have real pain and to have a test that is suboptimal for her, that shows no disease. Even if the patient ends up diagnosed with ischemic heart disease, they may receive less…