By Ed Edelson
EmpowHer's HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, June 3, (HealthDay News) -- For reasons not easily understood, many patients with the worst type of heart disease think they will live longer than their doctors tell them they will, new research shows.

Very carefully, cardiologists at Duke University began telling people being treated for heart failure -- the progressive loss of ability to pump blood -- that the condition would shorten their lives. They weren't believed.

EmpowHer Asks: We are asked all of the time by women how they should best advocate for themselves inside of their doctor’s office as we would pertain heart diseases or when somebody is visiting their cardiologist. What type of advice would you give a patient on how to advocate for better health for himself or herself in the doctor’s office?

EmpowHer Asks: Who should take aspirin for heart health?

Dr. Paul Underwood: Well, certainly Aspirin is very useful in thinning the blood and if a person has a blockage in blood vessels, you want your blood to be thin so it doesn’t actually form a clot and stop the blood flow completely. And so one of the first things that we would do for anyone who is having a heart attack as we give them Aspirin and then we’ll give them other blood thinners as well, but typically the first one they receive is Aspirin.

EmpowHer Asks: If heart disease effects ethnicities differently, does the FDA -- the Food and Drug Administration -- encourage drug companies to present data across all of the demographic groups?

EmpowHer Asks: How good of an idea will you have about a patient's heart after an EKG exam?

Dr. Paul Underwood: Well we can test the heart pretty much as it at rest with the EKG. So looking for abnormalities in the heart muscles they often will show up in different voltages on the EKG. Likewise if a person has extra heartbeats, a lot of extra heartbeats then they will show up on the EKG as well.