According to American researchers, women are no less affected by heart disease than men. In some cases, they even present greater mortality risks.
Globally, heart disease is often viewed as a “male” problem. However, they are still the leading cause of female mortality today. And, these heart diseases have very specific characteristics depending on the sexes. Depending on the risk factors, they can sometimes even be more deadly in women.
A team of American researchers has just revealed this week in the newspaper Global Heart, the magazine of the World Heart Federation, that these diseases affected the two sexes differently. According to these scientists, the traditional risk factors for heart attacks are the same in a man or in a woman (family predisposition, diabetes, hypertension, smoking, sedentary lifestyle) but where things differ, it is in the level of the risks incurred. .
Using data from American results, these scientists concluded that obesity increases the risk of heart attack by 64% for women and only 46% for men.
Remember that according to the Mona Lisa survey, 20.8% of French women are obese (BMI greater than or equal to 30). Result: “Contrary to a popular belief that dies, women are absolutely not protected against cardiovascular disease”, said at the time Professor Daniel Thomas, former president of the French Federation of Cardiology. “In France, one in two women will die of it and in the United States, the majority of deaths are even female. They must know that after menopause, they are no longer protected, ”added Dr Tabassome Simon, pharmacologist.
A finding that these American researchers confirm once again, because they have also found that women under 50 who have had a heart attack run a risk of dying twice as high as men, of equivalent severity.
Finally, for those over 65 who have a heart attack, the risk of death in the following year is much greater, 42% of them die within the year, against 24% of men.
Among the hypotheses put forward by these American doctors to explain these figures, the underdiagnosis which would affect more women than men. Drs. Kavita Sharma and Martha Gulati of the University of Ohio explain in the journal that, “in recent years, a body of studies has shown that cardiac involvement in women has been underestimated by the medical profession. . ”
And the researchers call for a change in the way we think about heart disease in women, “now we need to take these data into account and adapt diagnostic strategies and treatments accordingly. For too long, doctors believed heart disease was only for men. This belief is slowly fading away. But now is the time to define diagnostic and treatment strategies adapted to the sex of the patients, ”they conclude.
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