FRIDAY, March 8, 2002 (HealthDayNews) -- Heart attacks are no longer a guy thing.
Prevention programs targeted at middle-aged men have succeeded in cutting the number of heart attacks among men. However, such programs are now needed for women and the elderly, who are suffering increased rates of heart attacks, a new Mayo Clinic study says.
The study looked at people in Olmsted County, Minn., who'd been hospitalized for 1,820 heart attacks between 1979 and 1994. It found that heart-attack rates for men in the county dropped by 8 percent during that time, but heart attacks for women increased by 36 percent.
Further underscoring the gender/age divide, heart attacks among 40-year-old-men declined 31 percent, but were up 49 percent among 80-year-old women.
The study also found that while younger patients, both male and female, had an improved heart-attack survival rate over those 15 years, the survival rate remained relatively unchanged for people over age 75.
The study appears in this week's Annals of Internal Medicine.
The American Heart Association reports that 529,659 Americans died in 1999 of coronary heart disease, which causes heart attacks and angina. Women accounted for 262,391, or 49.5 percent, of those deaths.
Study author Dr. Véronique Roger, a cardiologist, says that 25 years ago, heart disease was primarily viewed as a male disease. However, the trends identified in this study show that's clearly not true now.
"There's sort of a good news-bad news aspect to this study," Roger says.
"One is that, in fact, heart disease rates declined among middle-aged men, which is a good thing. So, whatever prevention methods to reduce the risk of heart attacks among this age group have been effective, we need to continue them," she says.
"The other side of the story, however, is that [heart attacks are] increasing in groups in which we wouldn't have necessarily thought that they would increase," Rogers adds. "So, the implications from a prevention standpoint are quite clear. We need to target primary prevention methods toward women and the elderly."
That means programs designed specifically for women and the elderly to encourage and help them quit smoking, improve their diets and get more exercise, she says.
"It's common sense that perhaps the approaches that are used for middle-aged men would not necessarily work for elderly individuals or for women," Roger says.
The report didn't offer any suggested prevention programs for women or the elderly.
Roger suggests that different factors may be contributing to the higher rate of heart attacks among women and older people.
One is the increase in the number of women who smoke cigarettes. An estimated 22 percent of U.S. women are smokers, according to the American Lung Association.
Also, as more women enter the workforce, they have less time to devote to exercise and other healthy lifestyle choices.
Roger is now studying data from the years after 1994 to determine if women and the elderly continued to have increased heart-attack rates, compared to middle-aged men.
A doctor with the American Public Health Association (APHA) suspects the trend will be much the same as it was between 1979 and 1994.
"I don't think a lot has changed in the ensuing seven years," says Dr. Richard Levinson, APHA associate executive director.
There's been a lot of discussion in the medical community about the value of heart-attack prevention efforts for women and elderly people, but not much action, he says.
"It's a very interesting study. It points out the fact that women and the elderly have received less primary prevention and that if primary prevention works, as it seems to in younger males, then [women and the elderly] should be targets," Levinson says.
The challenge is to counter previous beliefs that women were naturally protected from heart disease by female sex hormones like estrogen, and that there wasn't much point in bothering with heart-attack prevention for elderly people, he adds.
What To Do: For more information about women and heart attacks, visit the American Heart Association or the Women's Heart Foundation. This National Institutes of Health site says lowering cholesterol levels in the elderly can reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke.
