|
 Women and men live equally long after heart attack - but because
women in general tend to live longer than men, the women should be
living longer after a heart attack, too, according to lead author
Dr. Emily M. Bucholz of the Yale School of Medicine and Yale School
of Public Health in New Haven, Connecticut.
Much of the differences between blacks and whites in the study could
be due to differences in the way the disease first appears, and the
treatments used, “but for women that was not the case,” Bucholz
said.
“The thing that’s completely different from prior studies is (those
studies) have not factored in what is the mean life expectancy for
women in the general population,” Bucholz told Reuters Health by
phone.
Every year about 735,000 Americans have a heart attack, and 15
percent die from it, according to the Centers for Disease Control
and Prevention.
For the new study, researchers used data on more than 140,000
Medicare beneficiaries hospitalized for a heart attack between 1994
and 1995. Almost half were women. Less than 10 percent were black.
The average age was 76.
White men and women hospitalized for heart attack at age 70 lived an
average of about nine years afterward, compared to about seven years
for black men and women hospitalized at the same age, the authors
reported in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Men lost about 3.5 years of potential life, whereas women lost 5.5
years. Whites lost an average of 4.5 years of life, and blacks lost
about 5.5 years.
Black patients tended to have more severe heart attacks and more
heart failure afterward. They also had more diabetes to start with,
indicating that they were a sicker population than the white
patients, Bucholz said.
Not only did blacks have more cardiac risk factors at the time of
the heart attack, but they “also were less likely to get acute
treatments,” like clot-busting drugs or cardiac procedures like
angioplasty, said Dr. Jack V. Tu of Sunnybrook Health Sciences
Center in Toronto.
[to top of second column] |
Whether this is because black patients visit hospitals that provide
poorer care, or they get a lower standard of care in hospitals that
also treat white patients, is still unclear, Bucholz said.
This explains some of the racial disparity, she said.
Both women and blacks are less likely to receive certain types of
cardiac care, but these gaps may be narrowing over time, Tu told
Reuters Health by email. He wrote an editorial comment published
with the new results.
“It’s not that every patient loses three years of life or one year
of life, some live for 30 days, some live for years and years,”
since heart attack severity is on a continuum, Bucholz said.
There is not much individuals can do to address these gender and
race disparities, but overall national policy can address them,
Bucholz said.
“This study reiterates that these disparities still exist, and we
can do better,” she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1rqxiby Journal of the American College of
Cardiology, online August 3, 2015.
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
 |
