Surprising Trends in Heart Attacks Among Women

Heart attack rates have increased among middle-age women in the past two decades, but the risk of a woman dying from a heart attack has dropped.  Amytis Towfighi, from University of Southern California – Los Angeles (USA), and colleagues analyzed data on US adults, ages 35 to 54 years, who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES),during the periods of 1988 to 1994 and 1999 to 2004. Among women, the risk of of future coronary heart disease worsened between the two study timeframes.  The researchers warn that: “Over the past 2 decades, MI prevalence has increased among midlife women, while declining among similarly aged men. Also, although the risk of future hard cardiovascular events remains higher in midlife men compared with midlife women, the gap has narrowed in recent years. Greater emphasis on vascular risk factor control in midlife women might help mitigate this worrisome trend.”  In a separate study, Viola Vaccarino, from Emory University School of Medicine (Georgia, USA), and colleagues studied data collected on 916.380 patients from the National Registry of Myocardial Infarction with a confirmed diagnosis of MI, investigating hospital mortality rates after acute MI.  The team founds that mortality from myocardial infarction among women under the age of 55 dropped from 5.1% to 2.4% from 1994 to 2006, representing a 52.9% total reduction; the decline in mortality was three times as large as that seen in men of the same age.   They remark that: “In recent years, women, particularly younger ones, experienced larger improvements in hospital mortality after MI than men. The narrowing of the mortality gap between younger women and men is largely attributable to temporal changes in risk profiles.”