(Elizabeth Pratt / Healthline) — Women’s blood vessels age at a faster rate than men’s.
Researchers say this could explain why women develop different forms of cardiovascular disease at different times than their male counterparts.
Their study, published in JAMA Cardiology, found that blood pressure elevations occurred much earlier in women than it did in men, beginning as early as the 30s.
“We had previously known that measures of arterial stiffening tend to accelerate faster in women compared to men in later life, after the menopausal transition, but these findings indicate that the faster acceleration in arterial changes really begins much earlier in life, and that sex differences in the pattern actually persists from the younger all the way through to the older decades of aging,” said Dr. Susan Cheng, senior author of the study and director of public health research at the Cedars-Sinai Smidt Heart Institute in Los Angeles.
“This tells us that the health of arteries and their response over time to factors that put stress on arteries is likely quite different between females and males, and this has implications for a range of organ system and disease processes that rely on having healthy arteries,” Cheng told Healthline. (…)