South Asian women urged to check heart health

3 hours ago

Grace Woodand

Cathy Minton,Bradford

News image — The cholesterol test provides results in a few minutes

BBC Two women sit at a desk. A woman with a pink jacket pierces the finger of a woman with a grey cardigan and black headscarf. She is performing a medical test. — The cholesterol test provides results in a few minutes

Women from South Asian backgrounds are being encouraged to get cholesterol tests which indicate how likely they are to have a heart attack.

Yorkshire Women's Forum hosts weekly drop-in sessions in Bradford which offer health support to women aged from 40 to 60, alongside craft workshops.

According to research from PocDoc, which creates the test, Asian women are at a higher risk of heart disease.

Yorkshire Women's Forum director Noshina Kiani said the sessions were able to reach women who were unlikely to seek health support elsewhere.

She said: "For South Asian women, like many other barriers that women face, they also have cultural stigma related to health, and thinking about themselves and putting themselves first, which they don't do.

"They're usually at the end of a really long list of people – so it's important to encourage them to look after their health."

Kiani said many of the women who attended the sessions at Manningham Mills Community Centre were in the "sandwich generation", looking after teenage children and elderly parents while going through peri-menopause or menopause.

"Through the programme we're helping them thrive and reset diet, sleep and better prepare them for the future," she said.

A woman with long shiny black hair. She is smiling and standing in front of a brick wall. She is wearing a pink blazer — Yorkshire Women's Forum director Noshina Kiani says women from South Asian backgrounds are at a higher risk of heart disease

The test takes a prick of blood, an image of which is then uploaded into an app displaying cholesterol levels, heart health age and risks of having a stroke or heart attack in the next 10 years.

Robina Mohammad, who regularly attends Yorkshire Women's Forum sessions, took the heart test on Wednesday.

"I had been unwell for a while and I had got to a point where I thought to myself 'I'm letting my illness define who I am' and vegetating and thinking 'I will do something when I get better' but actually there is no guarantee that I'm going to get better.

"My mum passed away last year and I saw how immobile she was, and I decided then that I didn't want to be like that. I didn't want to be so dependent on someone," she said.

About 20 women attend the group, which is part of a series of regular activities including a sewing group, gardening club and up-cycling workshops.

A woman with a black headscarf smiles at the camera. She is sitting in front of a brick wall and there are colourful vases to her right — Robina Mohammad decided to take the test because of family illnesses

Dr Kate Bunyan, lead clinical director at the company behind the tests said many women still thought of heart disease as a "men's problem".

"Heart disease is the number one killer of women globally, and that also applies in the UK," she said.

She explained that women from South Asian or Afro Caribbean backgrounds had a greater risk of cardiovascular disease.

She said: "The genetics play a part and then we layer on top of that environmental factors and social factors. And that means that different communities can also find they are disproportionately represented in those risk groups."

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