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 attention
Heart 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-related studies. Streisand’s own website cites a Los Angeles Times report noting that women made up less than a quarter of participants in heart-related studies, while women’s heart disease was also less likely to be properly diagnosed than men’s.
Cardiologist Bernadine Healy described the problem as “Yentl syndrome” in 1991, referencing the Streisand film about a woman who had to disguise herself as a man to receive an education. The idea was that women often received proper heart treatment only after showing symptoms that resembled those typically seen in men.
Streisand’s $10 million gift
Streisand’s $10 million contribution helped fund the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai.
The donation was part of a broader campaign that raised more than $22 million for research into women’s cardiovascular health.The singer also helped recruit other major donors, including Michael Bloomberg, Barry Diller, Diane von Furstenberg, Ralph Lauren, Irwin Jacobs, Ronald Perelman, Sumner Redstone, and Haim Saban. Several contributed $1 million each, helping expand the centre’s research capacity.Streisand said she had long been angered by inequality, including gender discrimination in medicine.
She argued that women deserved the same level of scientific attention and research investment as men, particularly in an area as serious as heart disease.
How women’s heart disease can differ
One of the centre’s central goals is to address the fact that heart disease does not always look the same in women and men. Cedars-Sinai explains that men more often experience the classic heart-attack symptom of chest pain during exertion, while women are more likely to report chest pressure, indigestion, shortness of breath, and fatigue.The underlying causes can differ as well. In men, heart disease is most commonly linked to a blocked coronary artery. In women, it is often caused by reduced blood flow in the heart’s small arteries, a condition known as microvascular coronary dysfunction.That difference matters because standard diagnostic tools may not reveal the problem in women. The centre says it is developing new treatment strategies and comprehensive risk assessments based on these biological differences.
Research-driven care for women
The Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center provides care to more than 1,700 women annually. Its work combines clinical treatment with research designed to improve how doctors identify and manage cardiovascular disease in female patients.Cedars-Sinai says the centre is one of only a few medical centres worldwide to use an adenosine cardiac magnetic resonance imaging stress test for diagnosing heart disease. The centre says this tool is better than an angiogram, the standard diagnostic approach for men, at revealing microvascular coronary dysfunction in women.The centre’s approach reflects a shift away from treating women’s heart disease as a smaller version of men’s disease. By studying sex-specific symptoms, risk factors, and diagnostic patterns, it aims to help doctors detect problems earlier and tailor treatment more effectively.
A legacy of advocacy
Streisand’s involvement went beyond writing a cheque. She worked with Dr Noel Bairey Merz, the centre’s medical director, to raise awareness and funding for women’s cardiovascular research.
The two also delivered a TED Talk on the issue in the years before the centre’s dedication.Merz said women’s health research was often constrained by political debates and by the perception that heart disease was less urgent than other conditions. She hoped private philanthropy could help stabilise research funding and allow scientists to pursue questions that public grants did not always support.The centre’s work has helped bring greater attention to an issue that affects millions of women.
Its focus on research, education, and clinical care reflects Streisand’s belief that women should not have to wait for their symptoms to resemble men’s before receiving appropriate treatment.
Why the centre still matters
Fourteen years after the donation, the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center continues to serve women whose symptoms may be overlooked or misunderstood. Its work remains important because cardiovascular disease continues to kill more women than all cancers combined.The centre also highlights the value of funding research that asks different questions. Instead of assuming that male-focused studies can fully explain women’s heart health, it examines how sex, symptoms, vascular function, and risk factors may interact in distinct ways.Streisand’s gift began as a response to a personal and societal concern, but its impact has endured. By helping create a centre dedicated to women’s hearts, she supported a model of care that treats women’s cardiovascular health as a priority in its own right.