Study Reveals Women More Likely To Die After Heart Attack
According to a recent study, researchers found that women who do not get angiography or angioplasty after a heart attack were twice as likely as men to die within a month.
Researchers said that women are far less likely than men to receive angiography or angioplasty when treated for heart attacks at the hospital.
“This suggests that we could reduce mortality in female patients by using more invasive procedures,” said Dr. Francois Schiele, chief cardiologist at the University Hospital of Besancon, France. Women should be treated with all recommended strategies just as men are, he told Reuters.
Earlier studies have suggested that women have a higher risk of death after a heart attack than men, but it is unclear why. A good explanation could be biological makeup, according to researchers, but there were also big differences in treatments between men and women.
Researchers gathered data from more than 3,500 patients who were treated for heart attacks between January 2006 and December 2007 and found that women, who made up almost one-third of the patients, were on average 9 years older than men and had more health problems.
The majority of heart studies are done on men, leaving women an understudied population. Of those who were studied, researchers found that women received fewer effective treatments for heart attacks. Women were also almost twice as likely to die while in the hospital and/or during the month following the attack.
Dr. Marcelo Di Carli, director of Cardiovascular Imaging at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston, told Reuters that women with heart disease also have a higher chance of dying as opposed to men. Carli, who was not involved in the study, said he was not surprised by the findings, but added that women have different heart attack symptoms than men.
“Just about every major hospital in the United States has a program on women’s health. Things are changing in a positive way because there’s so much research,” he said.
He added that women have different symptoms, but also may have no symptoms. One important difference is that women tend to have problems in smaller blood vessels, rather than the main coronary arteries. “This disease looks different in women.”
The study was presented by Schiele at the American College of Cardiology meeting in Atlanta. The research was sponsored by European drug makers including GlaxoSmithKline, Novartis and Sanofi-Aventis.
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