Author: Melissa Breyer / Source: TreeHugger
In a disturbing new trend, researchers find that heart attacks are on the rise for young women.
When you imagine the typical heart attack victim, do you see an older male? Most people do. Thankfully, deaths due to heart disease have been declining steadily over the last 40 years due to progress in the prevention and treatment of coronary heart disease.
But curiously, the overall numbers have leveled off recently and researchers weren’t sure why.Now, they think they have an answer: Heart attacks in older people may be waning, but heart attacks in younger people, especially women, are on the rise, according to a new study published in the American Heart Association journal, Circulation. As Viola Vaccarino writes in the study’s accompanying editorial:
The authors report a staggering increase in the annual incidence of hospitalized MI [myocardial infarction] among young women (35–54 years old), whereas the incidence decreased among men in the same age bracket.
Indeed, between 1995 and 1999 women between the ages of 35 and 54 accounted for 21 percent of those hospitalized for heart attacks. Between 2010 and 2014, that number rose to 31 percent. For men of the same age, the number went from 30 to 33 percent. While the percentage of heart attacks occurring in young men increased slightly during the 20 years span of the study, the actual number of heart attack in men in the age group went down – young women did not see a similar drop.
How unfair is that? Really unfair, especially since, remarkably, the increase appears to be related to the fact women are not treated for heart disease in the same way men are.
The researchers found that women hospitalized for heart attacks were less likely than men to receive therapies to open clogged arteries (21 percent less likely), or to receive guideline recommended medications such as non-aspirin…
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