Barbra Streisand’s $10 million gift helps women’s heart centre treat 1,700 patients annually

Photo: Barbra Streisand/ Instagram In 2012, Barbra Streisand donated $10 million to Cedars-Sinai to create a research centre focused on women’s cardiovascular health. The gift helped establish the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center, a facility dedicated to understanding why heart disease can affect women differently from men and improving diagnosis and treatment for female patients. According to Cedars-Sinai, the centre now provides research-driven cardiac care to more than 1,700 women each year.The donation was not simply a high-profile act of philanthropy. It responded to a long-standing gap in medicine, where heart disease research has often relied heavily on male subjects while women’s symptoms and underlying conditions can differ. Fourteen years on, the centre remains focused on closing that gap through patient care, research, and education.Why women’s heart health needed attentionHeart disease is the leading cause of death among women in the United States. Cedars-Sinai says more than 500,000 women die from cardiovascular disease each year, a figure greater than deaths from all cancers combined.Despite that scale, women have historically been underrepresented in heart-relat...