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New Criteria for Heart Disease in Women

Posted on: Tuesday, 13 February 2007, 18:00 CST

U.S. doctors want to add family history of heart disease and blood levels of C-reactive protein to the risk list for women's heart disease.

Our best means of prevention is through early identification of those most at risk, said Roger Blumental, director of the Ciccarone Preventive Cardiology Center at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore.

Blumenthal's own research showed that the gold standard Framingham Risk Estimate for heart attacks missed almost one-third of women over age 60 who had advanced hardening of the arteries.

To determine what factors to use to close this gap, he and his colleagues studied data from the U.S. Women's Health Study, which tracked coronary events in over 24,000 healthy women over age 45 for more than a decade.

The study included data on race, age, body mass index, menopausal status, exercise, alcohol use, hormone replacement therapy and use of vitamin E. The study also considered blood levels of homocysteine, creatinine, fibrinogen and hemoglobin A1C.

The team found that only family history and C-reactive protein (hsCRP), which is linked to blood-vessel inflammation, significantly predicted which women were at risk for future cardiovascular disease. Adding these criteria changed the risk scores of at least 20 percent of the women studied, the researchers said.

The Hopkins research is published in the Feb. 14 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Source: United Press International

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