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Heart
Treatment Less Helpful For Women
NEW
YORK (Reuters Health) - Early, aggressive heart treatment may
be less beneficial for women than it is for men, results of a
study suggest. However, the findings should be interpreted with
caution because other research has shown no gender differences
when it comes to the heart treatments, the investigators note.
Dr. Bo Lagerqvist
of University Hospital in Uppsala, Sweden and colleagues compared
a group of heart disease patients who underwent early invasive
procedures with a group of patients who took blood clot-preventing
drugs and in general had less aggressive treatment (the ``control
group''). The invasive procedures included angiography (special
imaging of the heart's arteries using radioactive dye), artery-clearing
angioplasty or bypass surgery.
The study
included 749 women and 1,708 men. The researchers found that women
showed no differences in the rate of recurrent heart attack or
death regardless of which group they were in. Men, on the other
hand, were more likely to benefit from invasive procedures, and
the men who received early aggressive treatment were less likely
to suffer recurrent heart attacks or death during the study period,
the report indicates.
Overall, about
98% of men and women in the first group had an angiogram, usually
within 4 days of being admitted to the hospital. And 67% of women
and 82% of men had an angioplasty or bypass surgery, according
to the report in the July issue of the Journal of the American
College of Cardiology.
In the control
group, about 52% of men and women had an angiogram sometime during
the 1-year study, and 39% of women and 44% of men had a bypass
or angioplasty. About 11% to 12% of women in both groups had a
heart attack or died during the study. In contrast, 10% of men
in the invasive group and 16% of men in the control group had
a heart attack or died during the study period.
``In our sub-analysis,
women had less advantage of an early invasive strategy compared
with men,'' Lagerqvist said in an interview with Reuters Health.
``This has
not previously been shown, but we think that this finding should
be interpreted very cautiously, and the main implication of our
study is to start other studies in the future to confirm or reject
our findings,'' he added.
``It is also
important to remember that women as well as men had less symptoms
such as chest pains and less re-hospitalizations during the 12-month
follow-up period, when treated with an early invasive strategy,''
Lagerqvist told Reuters Health.
``It's an
interesting finding, but it's hard to know whether this is simply
the kind of statistical fluke you sometimes see when you're doing
post hoc analyses of the outcomes of a larger study,'' said Dr.
William Boden of Hartford Hospital in Connecticut, in a statement
for the American College of Cardiology. Boden was not a researcher
in the current study.
SOURCE:
Journal of the American College of Cardiology 2001;38:41-48.
Reference
Source 89
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