Higher Heart Death Rate for Women Told
A woman entering a hospital after suffering a heart attack is 43.8% more likely to die before leaving than a man admitted with the same condition, according to a study released Monday.
“The idea is that we found a substantial difference in death rates for women in hospitals as compared to men,” said Dr. Philip Greenland of the University of Rochester School of Medicine.
Greenland spent last year at Tel Aviv University analyzing data compiled by Israeli researchers who studied more than 5,800 heart attack patients hospitalized between 1981 and 1983.
The study involved 4,315 men and 1,524 women who had suffered heart attacks and found that 23% of the women and 16% of the men died during their initial hospital stays.
Heart attack, the leading killer of American women, tends to strike females when they are older and have more health problems, said Greenland, whose study appears in the February issue of the Dallas-based American Heart Assn.’s journal Circulation.
After researchers made adjustments for the ages of men and women studied, they found no significant differences in death rates when comparing heart rhythm and whether the patients had previous heart attacks.
But women with diabetes tended to have a greater chance of dying than men who also had diabetes, Greenland said.
“We understand that diabetes can lead to changes in the heart muscles, but what’s very peculiar is why this can lead to such difference in women as opposed to men,” he said.
The study is more significant than previous efforts, which produced contradictory conclusions, because a larger statistical sampling was used, Greenland said.
Critics have said that government-funded research typically focuses too heavily on middle-aged white men, overlooking knowledge about women’s health.
“Because all of the studies have been designed to look at slightly different things, it’s not surprising to me that most of them reach different conclusions,” said Dr. Nicholas Fiebach of Yale University School of Medicine.
Fiebach, whose study published last year concluded that women survive as well as men after heart attacks, said the debate in the medical community is healthy.
The women in Greenland’s study also had a higher incidence of heart failure than the men.
“We know that heart failure at the time of heart attack is usually a consequence of cumulative heart damage,” Greenland said.
Some evidence suggests that women and diabetics are more subject to “silent ischemia,” a recently discovered condition in which part of the heart muscle becomes starved for blood but doesn’t cause pain.
