More US women are surviving heart attack
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While men still fare better, fewer younger women are dying in the hospital after an acute heart attack than in the recent past, U.S. researchers said on Wednesday.
Earlier studies had found women under 55 died at about twice the rate of men of the same age who had an acute heart attack.
But those differences have narrowed, falling about 80 percent in the past 10 years, said Dr. Viola Vaccarino of Emory University in Atlanta, who presented her findings at a meeting of the American Heart Association in New Orleans.
“There is still a gap, but it is closing,” Vaccarino said in a telephone interview.
Vaccarino and colleagues studied heart attack trends by age and gender between 1994 and 2006 in a group of 916,380 patients in a national heart attack registry.
They found that hospital deaths among all patients fell sharply between 1994 and 2006, but the improvements were most pronounced in younger women.
In this group, they found a 53 percent drop in deaths among women under 55 between 1994 and 2006. Men of the same age saw only a 33 percent improvement in death rates over the same time period.
The reason for the improvements was not clear, but Vaccarino did notice that younger women who had heart attacks had lower risk factors such as diabetes, high cholesterol and hypertension than in the past.
And far fewer women had severe heart failure, which could reflect a prior, undiagnosed heart attack, she said.
“There is more awareness of women’s risk for heart attacks, and they might be more likely to be treated appropriately,” Vaccarino said.
She said younger women are still 30 percent more likely to die in the hospital after a heart attack than men.
Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of American women, according to the American Heart Association.
As with men, the most common sign of a heart attack in women is chest pain, but women are more likely than men to experience shortness of breath, nausea, back pain and jaw pain, according to the group’s Web site.
By Julie Steenhuysen
CHICAGO (Reuters)
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