부산대학교 도서관

Introduction: In Italy, despite the improvements in outcomes, cardiovascular disease (CVD) continue to be the leading cause of death in women.Hypothesis: The majority of women has no perception of this risk.Goals: Raising awareness among women about their main health threat.Methods: Women (≥18 years) living in the Lombardy region were invited from September 2022 to February 2023 to fill in a web-survey distributed in the general population through a public, anonymous link.Results: Of 2802 women who answered the call, 2217 (94%) completed the survey, including 107(5%) of women not born in Italy. The mean body mass index was 23.5±4.5 kg/m, with 25,8% of responders being overweight. Despite the perception of that weight gain was a serious problem in a high percentage women (42%), 26.4% of them did not perform any physical activity and 38.7% practiced less than the recommended 150 minutes a week. Nearly half (46.8%) checked their blood pressure annually and 38.2% have never had any CV test. Only 35.5% were aware of CVD as the leading cause of death (LCOD) in women and 2.5% indicated stroke as LCOD, while 40.9% still considered cancer as the greatest health threat for women. Awareness was greater with older age and increasing education and lower among unemployed and menopausal women. The main sources of information about health were considered general practitioner (51.6%) and the web (27.0%). Counterintuitively, women not born in Italy mostly use the Internet (40%, p=0.001). Finally, the survey showed that women were aware of seeing public health education campaigns about breast cancer (72.4%) and violence (19.7%) more frequently than of campaigns about CVD prevention(1.3%).Conclusions: Only one-third of all women in this pilot study are aware that CVD is their number one killer. Increasing awareness of CVD as the LCOD among women is a priority, requiring collaboration of healthcare practitioners, professional health organizations, as well as dedication of financial resources.