Heart Health

Heart Health, Heart Disease, Cardiovascular

• Knowing a Woman's heart - WHU May 2006
• Aspirin, Women & Heart Disease - WHU May 2006
• NZ Govt Health Strategies - Cardiovascular
• Hearts not helped by HRT - WHU July 2002
• Oestrogen does not prevent strokes - WHW Dec 2001
• Depressed women more likely to have heart disease - WHW June 2000
• Exercise and heart disease - WHU Jan 2000
• Group to study women and heart disease - WHU Jan 2000
• Women more prone to early death after heart attacks - WHW Sept 1999
• Passive smoking increases stroke risk - WHW Sept 1999
• Women with heart failure survive longer than men - WHW July 1999
• The Way to Women's Hearts- WHA Seminar 1999
• Hormones, hearts and herbals - WHU Nov 1998
• Getting to the heart of the matter: women and cardiovascular disease - WHU Oct 1997
• Low birth weight and heart disease - WHW Nov 1997
• Exercise and live longer - WHW July 1997

Resources

• WHIS pamphlet: Heart Health for women at mid-life and after - a guide to understanding and preventing cardiovascular disease
• WHIS pamphlet: Move it or Lose it - A guide to exercise for women at mid-life and after
• WHIS Information Pack: Mid-life Resource Pack ???
• Suggestions for Good Health at Mid-life and the Relief of Common Symptoms at Menopause

Knowing a Woman's heart

WHU May 2006

It seems that despite years of speculation by poets and scientists we are no closer to knowing about a woman's heart. WomenHeart, in the US, launched their 10 Q report on Valentines Day to bring greater attention to the significant gaps in our knowledge of women and heart disease. This report sets a powerful research agenda to address gender inequalities.

There is a certain amount of boredom in reporting what has long been noted- we do not know enough about women and heart disease. The 2001 Institutes of Medicine report on biological contributions to human health focused greater attention on the sex differences in biological function and the fall out from the 1998 HRT studies brought greater attention to the lack of knowledge around women and heart disease. Despite the belief that women "have made it" women's health status continues to reflect women's position, power and roles in society. Women's health activists have long called for attention to the whole women while health research continues to reflect a 'bikini' approach to women's health, focusing on breasts and the reproductive system....Read More (pdf)

Aspirin, Women & Heart Disease

WHU May 2006

Although both men and women have been regularly taking aspirin preventatively for heart disease, this practice has largely been based on the study of men. Recent research has uncovered that aspirin as a prophylactic behaves differently in men and women. This research highlights the dearth of knowledge about women and heart disease and challenges practices that have relied solely on the study of mens health....Read More (pdf)

NZ Govt Health Strategies - Cardiovascular

Don't start, do stop, for HRT? Hearts not helped by HRT

July 2002 Women's Health Update

Longer follow-up from the HERS study provides more bad news about hormone replacement therapy. After the first four years, HERS had shown an early increase in heart events in the study participants, women with coronary heart disease (CHD), but the effect levelled out at the end of the period. There was speculation that over a longer timeframe benefits might emerge, leading to the slogan 'Don't start, don't stop'.
But after another average 2.7 years follow-up of some study participants, no benefit emerged in the study, called HERS II. There was also no reduction in strokes among users of HRT....Read More

Oestrogen does not prevent strokes

December 2001 Women's Health Watch

Oestrogen does not reduce mortality or prevent further strokes in postmenopausal women who have had a recent stroke or suffered a temporary loss of circulation to the brain (transient ischaemic attack), according to The Women's Oestrogen for Stroke trial.

During the study, 664 women were recruited within 90 days of suffering a stroke or transient ischaemic attack. 99 women given oestradiol had a stroke or died compared with 93 women given placebo. Oestrogen therapy had no significant effect on risk of death or non-fatal stroke, but the risk of fatal stroke was higher for women taking oestrogen.

The trial's senior neurologist Lawrence Brass says the results mean current secondary stroke prevention methods are out the window. However the researchers are re-examining the data to see if there are any groups of women who would benefit from oestrogen.

Ref: Lancet 2001;358:

Depressed women more likely to have heart disease

June 2000 Women's Health Watch

Depressed women are more likely to develop coronary heart disease, according to a major American study. The researchers from Ohio State University College of Medicine studied more than 5000 women and nearly 3000 men who did not have heart disease in the early 1980s. These people were also evaluated for depression. Follow-up has found the participants who were depressed were more likely to have developed coronary heart disease. The depressed men were more likely to have died of heart disease but depression had no effect on the death rate in women. The reason for this result is unclear, the researchers say.

The research team says there was already evidence about links between depression and heart disease in men but little information about depression and heart disease among women. Future research should focus on finding out why depressed people may develop heart disease and finding ways to lower the risks.

Ref: Arch Intern Med 2000; 160:1261-68

Exercise and heart disease

January 2000 Women's Health Watch

Brisk walking substantially reduces women's risk of developing heart disease. Harvard researchers studied more than 72,000 women to find out whether walking or vigorous exercise were most effective for heart disease prevention. The study, reported in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that both walking and vigorous exercise reduced the number of heart attacks among the women studied. Women who walked the equivalent of three or more hours a week at a brisk pace, as well as those who exercised regularly and vigorously, had a low risk of heart disease compared to women who exercised infrequently. Inactive women who became active in middle age or later had a lower risk of heart disease than women who remained sedentary.

Ref: NEJM 1999;341:650-658

Group to study women and heart disease

January 2000 Women's Health Update

Women more prone to early death after heart attacks

September 1999 Women's Health Watch

Young women who have heart attacks are much more likely to die during hospitalisation than men, or older women, says a large US study.

Earlier studies had shown conflicting results about early deaths following heart attacks in women compared to men. The researchers analysed data on 155,565 women and 229,313 men aged between 30 and 89 years who were enrolled on a national registry between June 1994 and January 1998.

They found that overall mortality was 16.7% in women compared to 11.5% in men. Sex-based differences in mortality differed according to age. Among patients younger than 50 years, the mortality rate for women was twice that of men. The difference in rates decreased with age and was no longer significant after the age of 74 years.

It is not clear why this occurs, and the researchers called for special study of this high- risk group. They found that only one-third of the difference between men and women could be accounted for by differences in medical history, the clinical severity of the heart attack, and early management.
Ref: NEJM 1999; 341: 217-225

Passive smoking increases stroke risk

September 1999 Women's Health Watch

Our trustee Ruth Bonita was in the news for the results of her newly published study which showed that passive smoking significantly increased the risk of acute stroke among non-smokers and long-term ex-smokers. Ruth and her co-workers from the Auckland Medical School obtained information on the smoking habits and exposure to environmental smoke from 521 patients with a first-ever acute stroke and 1851 community controls.

After adjustment for various potential co--founders, the researchers discovered that there was a significantly increased risk of stroke for both men and women among non-smokers and those who hadn't smoked for more than 10 years.

Not surprisingly, the risk for current smokers compared to non or ex-smokers was higher still, four times the risk, for even higher - over six times the risk - when people exposed to environmental smoke were excluded from the control group.
Ref: Tob Control 1999;8:156-60

Women with heart failure survive longer than men

July 1999 Women's Health Watch

Women with terminal heart failure live twice as long as their male coun-terparts, according to a new study. The research, published in Circula-tion, found men with non-ischaemic heart disease were three times more likely to than women to die over an 18 month period. Men with ischae-mic heart disease were one and a half t times more likely to die during that period.

North Carolina cardiologist Kirkwood Adams says the different survival rates may be caused by bio-logical differences between males and females. Dr Adams says the research suggests different therapeutic approaches may need to be developed for men and women.
Ref: BMJ 1999:1098 (24 April)

The Way to Women's Hearts

WHA Seminar 1999

A Mini Conference on Women and Heart Health from Women's Health Action on 6th October 1999. Background papers and speakers list, Read More

Hormones, hearts and herbals

November 1998 Women's Health Update

Sandra Coney reports on highlights of the Annual Congress of the Australasian Menopause Society held recently in Auckland.

'The plain facts are that we have a trial that didn't show what anybody wanted,' said Professor Elizabeth Barrett-Connor at a controversial session on hormone replacement therapy and cardiovascular disease at the congress, which took place at the Carlton Hotel in Auckland during October.

'It certainly didn't show what I wanted - I personally believed that there was a lot of prescription bias, compliance bias, and I thought it was conceivable that the benefit of oestrogen had been greatly exaggerated. It never occurred to me that it would be bad for you. We have a study that shows that for women with heart disease it's bad for you in the first year. That's the bottom line. How can you start some women with heart disease on any regimen now and tell her that you're going to prevent heart disease if she can just live through the beginning of the treatment?' ...Read More

Getting to the heart of the matter: women and cardiovascular disease

October 1997 Women's Health Update

Does their gender protect women against heart disease and do they lose that protection at menopause? It has increasingly become a given wisdom that this is so, but recent work by Dr John McKinlay, a New Zealander who is a vice-president and director of the prestigious New England Research Institute in Boston, throws doubt on the proposition.

Dr McKinlay argues that at least some of the apparent discrepancy between men and women can be explained by gender bias in the health system...Read More

Low birth weight and heart disease

November 1997 Women's Health Watch

Results from a study recently published in the British Medical Journal show that low birth-weight is a risk factor for coronary heart disease in adulthood, and suggest '...a new explanation for the epidemics of coronary heart disease that accompany Westernisation.'

The research was conducted on Finish men born between 1924 and 1933. Birth records were investigated to look at pre-birth influences of the high rates of CHD in Finland. The researchers found that CHD death rates were highest in men who were thin at birth and had low placental weight but whose mothers had high body mass index during pregnancy. The effects were 'large and highly significant' and were consistent with prior studies. The researchers also noted that the effects of the mothers' BMI were restricted to women of less than average height.
Ref: BMJ 1997; 315: 837- 40

Exercise and live longer

July 1997 Women's Health Watch

Regular exercise reduces the risk of premature death by 30% in postmenopausal women, say Minnesota researchers who undertook one of the largest studies of its kind to be conducted with postmenopausal women.

They studied over 40,000 women aged between 55 and 69 when they enrolled and followed them for seven years. The researchers found that even one exercise session a week was effective in reducing deaths from a variety of causes, especially heart disease and respiratory disorders.

The greater the amount of activity the women engaged in, the greater benefit they gained. The most vigorous exercise - such as swimming, running, tennis, and aerobics - significantly decreased risk.
Ref: AMA 1997; 277: 1287-92

Resources

WHIS pamphlet: Heart Health for women at mid-life and after - a guide to understanding and preventing cardiovascular disease

Find Here

WHIS pamphlet: Move it or Lose it - A guide to exercise for women at mid-life and after

Find Here

WHIS Information Pack: Mid-life Resource Pack

Suggestions for Good Health at Mid-life and the Relief of Common Symptoms at Menopause

Read Here