Heart Attacks Becoming More Common for Women

(October 27, 2009) - Women should realize they are more likely than ever to suffer a heart attack. (Read about "Heart Attack") Heart attacks appear to have become more common in middle-aged women (Read about "Heart Disease & Women") over the past two decades. That's according to a report in the October 26 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Middle-aged women have historically had a lower overall risk of heart events and stroke (Read about "Stroke") than men of a similar age, according to background information in one of the articles. However, a recent report showing higher stroke rates among women than men in a sample representative of the U.S. population appeared to reveal a new phenomenon and raised the question of whether heart disease or heart attack were also becoming more prevalent among women.

Researchers analyzed data from U.S. adults age 35 to 54 who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys ten years apart. The researchers assessed how often men and women had heart attacks and also compared their Framingham coronary risk score, a measurement of heart disease risk over 10 years that includes factors such as age, cholesterol levels, blood pressure and smoking history. (Read about "Cholesterol" "Hypertension: High Blood Pressure" "Quit Smoking")

In both study periods, men age 35 to 54 years had more heart attacks than women in the same age group. However, the gap narrowed in more recent years as heart attacks decreased in prevalence among men and increased in prevalence among women Two point 5 percent of men and 0.7 percent of women reported a history of heart attack in during the first study, whereas ten years later 2.2 percent of men and 1 percent of women reported heart attacks.

Between the two time periods, the average Framingham coronary risk score showed an improving trend among men but decreased among women. In male participants, total cholesterol levels remained stable, high-density lipoprotein (HDL or "good" cholesterol) levels and systolic (top number) blood pressure levels improved and smoking levels declined. The only risk factor that improved among women was HDL levels. Diabetes (Read about "Diabetes") prevalence increased among both men and women, likely due to insulin resistance and the obesity (Read about "Obesity") epidemic in both sexes.

"Although men in their midlife years continue to have a higher prevalence of myocardial infarction and a higher 10-year risk of hard coronary heart disease than women of similar age, our study suggests that the risk is increasing in women, while decreasing in men," the authors write. "Therefore, intensification of efforts at screening for and treating vascular risk factors in women in their midlife years may be warranted."