Jean McSweeney,
PhD, RN, Professor

The main topics that I’m working on are women and heart disease. We are finishing up a grant right now where we’ve been looking at women’s symptoms and have been doing in-depth qualitative interviews.

Our next grant that we’re working on right now is the development of a questionnaire from the interviews, trying to specify what symptoms women have, very early symptoms called prodromal symptoms, and then symptoms they actually have with their myocardial infarction (MI).  We are hoping, with this questionnaire, that we’ll be able to test it nationwide and then develop a list of symptoms that women actually experience programmable months up to even a year prior to their MI and then the symptoms they actually have with their MI to help physicians and healthcare providers diagnose heart disease in women much earlier than we are able to currently. That’s basically what we’re trying to accomplish. Once we get all this information, we hope to devise educational programs to teach women and healthcare providers the early symptoms that women have with MI.  I’ve also done work with heart transplant recipients and their spouses that is very interesting to me. I’m just interested in the entire scope of cardiovascular problems. I’ve done some work with cardiac rehab in the past also.

I’ve been invited to do some research with a cardiovascular surgeon to see if we could interview about quality of life and some of the problems people are experiencing after some of the new techniques, to see if the new techniques are better than the old techniques as far as quality of life and getting back on their feet quicker.

The first research project I worked on dealing with women with heart disease was funded by the American Nurses Foundation. Other projects are being funded by the American Heart Association, National Institutes of Health, and Sigma Theta Tau. The UAMS College of Nursing is funding intramural research projects as well.