Heart attacks are becoming increasingly common in middle aged women, doctors warned last night.
Increased rates of smoking, obesity and poor diet may have contributed to a steady rise in heart disease among women.
Men aged 35 to 54 years have a higher risk of heart attack than similarly aged women, but the gap has narrowed in recent years, according to Professor Viola Vaccarino and her team at Emory University, Atlanta, USA.
They found that the risk has fallen in men and increased among women. Results are based on US adults who took part in national surveys during 1988 to 1994 and 1999 to 2004, and information on 916,380 heart attack patients held on a US national register.
In the first time period it was 2.5 per cent in men and 0.7 per cent in women. This changed to 2.2 per cent of men and one per cent of women more recently. Further analysis reveals that men’s vascular risk factors tended to improve, but the rate of diabetes increased in both sexes.
Writing in the Archives of Internal Medicine, the team state: "Over the past two decades, heart attack prevalence has increased among midlife women, while declining among similarly aged men.
"Also, although the risk of future hard cardiovascular events remains higher in mid-life men compared with mid-life women, the gap has narrowed in recent years."
The team recommends a greater emphasis on controlling women’s risk factors in middle age, to "help mitigate this worrisome trend".
They also looked at hospital mortality and found a marked decline in all patients, particularly women in almost every age group.
Professor Vaccarino commented: "We found that the number of younger women who die in hospital after a heart attack, compared with men in the same age group, has narrowed over the last few years."
Towfighi, A., Zheng, L. and Ovbiagele, B. Sex-Specific Trends in Midlife Coronary Heart Disease Risk and Prevalence. The Archives of Internal Medicine, Vol. 169, October 26, 2009, pp. 1762-66 and 1767-74.
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