Central Arkansas Go Red for Women spotlights survivors, research and the toll of heart disease
The 2026 Central Arkansas Go Red for Women Luncheon in Little Rock is built around a simple but urgent message: cardiovascular disease remains the leading cause of death among women, and too many women still reach care after symptoms have already been minimized, misunderstood or delayed. The Nov. 5 gathering will bring together survivors, volunteers, advocates and community leaders for an event that blends celebration with clinical warning.
The program will center on a Survivor Gallery featuring five Arkansas women whose lives have been altered by cardiovascular disease: Charity Miller, Heather Haywood, Lisa Gaddy, Rachael Bates and Sonia Lucas Meyer. Their stories are not framed as abstractions or awareness slogans. They represent the day-to-day consequences of heart failure, arrhythmia, valve disease and the long recovery many patients face after symptoms first appear. In women, those early warning signs are often subtle enough to be missed in primary care, dismissed in emergency settings or rationalized by patients themselves until the disease is advanced.
One of the day’s most personal stories belongs to Lisa Gaddy, whose course spans more than two decades of living with advanced heart failure. Her history is marked by family loss to congestive heart failure, a diagnosis at age 40 of severe heart failure, cardiomyopathy, mitral valve prolapse and atrial fibrillation, and an ejection fraction of 17% at the time of diagnosis. She later underwent multiple cardiac interventions, including implantation of a left ventricular assist device, or LVAD, a mechanical pump used in patients with severe heart failure when the native heart can no longer circulate blood effectively.
Gaddy’s trajectory is a reminder that severe cardiovascular disease is not confined to older age. Women with inherited risk, structural heart disease or rhythm disorders may spend years navigating fragmented care before the full burden of disease becomes visible. An ejection fraction of 17% reflects profound systolic dysfunction, a level of impairment associated with poor exercise tolerance, fluid retention and repeated hospitalizations. In that setting, an LVAD can serve as a bridge to transplant or as destination therapy, but the device itself also signals just how far the disease has progressed.
Jean C. McSweeney’s legacy still shapes how women’s symptoms are recognized
The luncheon also will recognize this year’s recipient of the Jean C. McSweeney, Ph.D., RN Women in Medicine Award, named for the Arkansas nurse researcher whose work changed the way clinicians think about women’s heart attack symptoms. Her research showed that women often experience warning signs different from the dramatic chest pain commonly depicted in media, and that many delay seeking medical care even when they sense something is wrong.
That contribution matters in the exam room and in the emergency department. Women may present with shortness of breath, fatigue, nausea, back discomfort, jaw pain or a vague sense of unease rather than the crushing chest pressure that still dominates public perception of myocardial infarction. When those symptoms are not recognized quickly, the window for reperfusion therapy, rhythm stabilization and complication prevention narrows. Earlier recognition is not a public relations goal; it is a survival issue.
The award’s naming is more than ceremonial. It reflects a specific shift in cardiovascular care, from assuming that heart disease presents the same way in all patients to recognizing sex-based differences in symptom patterns, delay behaviors and care pathways. For clinicians, that means asking better questions. For patients, it means believing symptoms even when they do not fit the classic script.
Survivor stories carry the clinical message farther than statistics alone
The American Heart Association has built Go Red for Women around awareness, education and research support, but the event’s strength lies in how it translates those goals into lived experience. Survivors often make the hidden burden of heart disease visible in a way that numerical risk estimates cannot. They describe the anxiety of unexplained symptoms, the disruption of repeated admissions, the strain on families and the long process of learning to live with chronic cardiac disease.
In that sense, Gaddy’s role as a featured survivor is especially consequential. Her current advocacy for others with heart failure connects personal experience to public education, especially around family history and symptom recognition. Family history remains one of the first clues that risk may be elevated, and in conditions such as cardiomyopathy and atrial fibrillation, that background can shape screening, counseling and earlier intervention.
The event also arrives against a broader clinical reality: women continue to be underdiagnosed and undertreated when cardiovascular symptoms do not follow male-pattern expectations. The problem is not only access. It is interpretation. Symptoms are filtered through the assumptions of patients, families and clinicians, and those assumptions can slow treatment even when the disease itself is advancing.
A local fundraiser with direct implications for women’s cardiovascular care
The luncheon at the Little Rock Marriott is scheduled to open at 11 a.m., with tables and tickets still available. The event is designed to raise awareness and support the American Heart Association’s work in women’s cardiovascular health and research. Those efforts matter because prevention, symptom recognition and treatment adherence remain the main tools for reducing death and disability from heart disease.
Behind the program’s celebratory language sits a much harder clinical truth. Women still die from heart disease at high rates, and many do not receive a timely diagnosis until symptoms have become severe enough to require advanced therapies. Public education campaigns help, but they only work when the message reaches the people most likely to delay care: patients who feel their symptoms are “not bad enough,” and clinicians who may not immediately connect those symptoms to cardiovascular disease.
The McSweeney award, the survivor gallery and Gaddy’s story all point in the same direction. Women’s heart disease is often detectable earlier than it is diagnosed, and earlier diagnosis remains the difference between outpatient management and advanced heart failure care. The challenge in Central Arkansas, as elsewhere, is making that recognition routine rather than rare.