The new Women’s Heart Health Clinic, which opened this year at the Stanford Cardiovascular Institute, wants the community to know that Feb. 1 is “Go Red” day — a day devoted to fighting heart disease, the number one killer of women in the country.

While most women fear contracting breast cancer far more than they worry about their heart health, cardiovascular disease in fact kills almost twice as many women per year as do all types of cancer combined, according to the American Heart Association.

Even more disturbing, while the number of men who die from heart disease yearly has decreased rapidly since 1984, the death rate among women with heart disease has barely fluctuated.

Jennifer Tremmel, cardiologist and director of the new Women’s Heart Health Clinic, has an explanation for this trend.

“Women have always been disproportionately understudied in cardiovascular disease,” she said, pointing out that nearly all of the subjects historically used in cardiovascular research since 1940 have been male.

Only recently are doctors realizing that women do not present all of the same symptoms for heart disease as males do and that there are certain sex-specific differences and risk factors in women that need to be taken into account.

“In the last decade there’s been a growth of interest and enough knowledge about sex difference that we can offer a clinic like this one,” Tremmel said. “We’re trying to treat a woman like a woman instead of treating her with information that comes from men.”

The growing Women’s Heart Health Clinic serves approximately 100 patients, who often come to Tremmel after failing to be diagnosed properly by their primary physicians.

“In general the women I end up seeing are at the end of their diagnostic workup,” Tremmel said. “Their doctors are frustrated; they don’t know what’s wrong. I think we have a good multidisciplinary way to help them.”

Tremmel has collected a great deal of female-specific cardiovascular research and has seen enough female patients presenting the same “atypical” cardiovascular disease symptoms to recognize and diagnose illnesses in her patients. She often diagnoses diseases that general physicians overlook.

For example, earlier in the year, a healthy 48-year-old woman came to the clinic after months of experiencing redness and shortness of breath while jogging. Tremmel was able to use specialized tests to diagnose the patient with endothelial heart dysfunction, a form of heart disease that often goes undetected and undiagnosed in women, according to her.

“I could have easily been dismissed [by another doctor], but [at the Women’s Heart Health Clinic] they’re specifically interested in women,” the patient said to Business Wire magazine.

Tremmel sees the benefits of sex-specific medical treatment not only in the cardiovascular field, but also in other medical sectors. She is working to popularize the trend.

“We have established an Internal Referral Network so that women who require specialized care beyond my expertise — such as electrophysiology or diabetes treatment — can easily be referred to another physician in our group who is also committed to treating them in an evidence-based, sex-specific manner,” she said.

Nurse practitioner Mary Nejedly was inspired to work for the Women’s Heart Health Clinic when a friend’s mother died of a heart attack at the age of 61. The woman, who had seen a doctor about her symptoms, had been told she was suffering only from indigestion.

If she had been a 61-year-old man, Nejedly believes, she may have been recommended for further evaluation and perhaps her death could have been prevented.

“When you think about heart disease, you think about a middle-aged man walking out of an office meeting after a heavy meal, clutching his chest,” she said. “We have to understand that there is a different face to heart disease.”