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Stress Test Can Gauge
Women's Heart Risk
Excerpt
by Andrew Stern,
Reuters Health
Doctors hesitate to give women stress
tests to diagnose heart disease because the results can be misleading,
but a study said that a woman's stamina on the treadmill exam
can help gauge her risk.
Stress tests detect abnormal heartbeats
in some women that scientists believe are caused by hormonal differences
between women and men, and are not necessarily a sign of heart
disease.
But focusing on a woman's fitness
during the treadmill test -- how long she can exercise as her
heart beats faster and the time it takes her heartbeat to return
to normal after she stops -- does predict her risk of eventually
dying from heart disease, said study author Samia Mora of Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore.
In a 20-year followup study of
nearly 3,000 women who took treadmill tests in the 1970s, the
women who performed below average were 3.5 times more likely to
die of heart disease compared to those who performed better than
average.
Unreliable stress test results
sometimes require women to undergo expensive followup tests to
see if their heart abnormalities were a sign of heart problems.
Half of women with perceived abnormalities on the stress test
turn out not to have heart disease.
In the report published in the
Journal of the American Medical Association, Mora concluded that
regular exercise was more important than losing weight, lowering
blood pressure or reducing cholesterol levels in lessening a woman's
risk of heart attack or stroke.
Heart disease kills one out of
two U.S. women and two-thirds die without having previously identifiable
symptoms, the study said.
"The stress test has been around
for 30 years, but for a long time it was thought to be not an
effective test of women's heart risk," said cardiologist Nieca
Goldberg of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
"Why this is so important is it
addresses the question about the best way to assess heart risk
in women," Goldberg, who was not involved in the study, said in
a telephone interview.
Another journal, Circulation, published
a study earlier this month that found exercise capacity was more
accurate at predicting heart disease in women than in men.
Reference
Source 89
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