(Life Sciences Medical News) — Heart attacks pose a greater threat to women than to men. A team at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) has determined that in the first year after a heart attack women are subject to a significantly higher mortality risk than men with similar case histories. The scientists are urging doctors to provide intensive support to female heart attack patients, above all in the first 365 days after the event.
Heart attacks are still seen as a disease that primarily affects men. That is true in the sense that men account for around two-thirds of patients hospitalized after suffering a heart attack. Studies in recent years have shown, however, that women have a higher incidence of death from heart attacks and their consequences. One reason for this is that women suffer “different” heart attacks: Statistically, they tend to be 10 years older at the time of the infarct and are more likely to have accompanying conditions such as diabetes. Moreover, it is less common for heart attacks in women to be triggered by a local narrowing of blood vessels that can be widened relatively easily.
Instead, they suffer more often from diffuse coronary artery disease. In these cases, local ablation procedures have less chance of success. Dr. Romy Ubrich, the first author of the paper, explains the approach: “We wanted to find out whether the mortality risk of female patients after a heart attack is still higher after adjusting for those factors.” The research drew on patient data collected in two studies (“ISAR-RISK” and “ART”) with a total of 4,100 participants.
“If we look at the full five-year investigation period after the heart attack, there are no unusually large gender-specific differences if we adjust for factors such as age, accompanying conditions and type of treatment,” says Romy Ubrich. “But we were surprised by the data for the first 365 days after the event: During that time, women were 1.5 times as likely to die as men.” (…)