Women are less likely to develop heart disease, especially at younger ages, due to a better risk profile compared to men, according to a recent study in The Lancet. It also established how the patterns of risk factors and their association with people developing heart disease remained the same in low-, middle- and high-income countries. The study was distributed among 1.56 thousand people from 21 countries.
So how many men and women developed heart disease in the study?
During the ten years that the 1,560 participants were followed, 4.7% of women and 7.6% of men had a major cardiovascular event. When standardized for age (the mean age of male participants was slightly higher than that of female participants), the researchers found that the incidence of cardiac events was 5 per 1,000 person-years in women and 8.2 per 1,000 person-years in men.
“Women have a more favorable cardiovascular risk profile than men, especially at younger ages. This finding was supported by lower rates of major cardiovascular disease in women than in men,” the study said.
This, according to the study, was not because the risk factors were very different in women, but because they developed many of the risk factors, such as high cholesterol levels, later in life.
What are the risk factors in men and women?
When it came to the risk profile, the study found that systolic blood pressure (the pressure in the arteries when the heart beats) increased with age in both men and women, but average levels tended to be lower in women Similarly, fasting blood glucose levels increased with age in both sexes, but were slightly lower in women than in men until age 55–70.
Again, waist-to-hip ratio, which can give a more accurate measure of belly fat than BMI, was found to be consistently lower in women than men across all age categories. A higher proportion of men were smokers or ex-smokers, consumed alcohol and had little physical activity.
Conversely, mean levels of non-HDL cholesterol, or bad cholesterol, increased with age in women, but not in men. Indeed, the concentration of all lipids increased in women with age, but a similar pattern was not observed in men. More women also reported symptoms of depression.
Risk factors associated with a major cardiovascular event were also slightly different in men and women: high non-HDL cholesterol was more strongly associated with major cardiovascular disease in men than in women, while symptoms of depression were more strongly associated in men Hypertension was the main risk factor for cardiovascular disease in both women and men, followed by abdominal obesity in women and high non-HDL cholesterol in men.
“Women and men have similar risk factors, which emphasizes the importance of a similar strategy for the prevention of cardiovascular disease in men and women,” the first author of the article and a researcher at the Research Institute in Population Health (PHRI) from McMaster University, Marjan Walli. Attaei said in a statement.
However, diet was more strongly associated with risk in women than in men, “something that has not been previously described and requires independent confirmation,” said PHRI executive director Salim Yusuf, a professor of medicine at McMaster.
So what to do?
As the study shows, men have higher levels of metabolic risk factors at younger ages, so the researchers suggest that risk factor control should begin at an even younger age in men than in women.
The authors also suggested that studies are needed to see if menopause could be an independent risk factor for heart disease, because other studies that followed pre- and postmenopausal women found that increased levels of bad cholesterol it was more substantial than could be attributed. grow old. This, however, was beyond the scope of the current study.
The researchers, referring to other studies, also said that the use of statins can help reduce bad cholesterol, thereby significantly reducing the risk in men and women.
The researchers also said that smoking was a risk factor for men and women worldwide, and the difference in smoking patterns reflected the difference in heart disease levels and not an inherent reduced risk from smoking. “The well-established harmful effects of smoking highlight the importance of initiatives aimed at increasing smoking cessation rates and decreasing initiation rates in all smokers, regardless of biological sex,” the study said.
