Washington, Oct 16 (ANI): After a heart attack, women's hearts are more likely to maintain their systolic function-their ability to contract and pump blood from the chambers into the arteries, according to new research.
According to C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, Director of the Women's Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai Heart Institute in Los Angeles, this suggests that heart disease manifests differently in women, affecting the microvasculature (small blood vessels) instead of the macrovasculature (major blood vessels) as it does in men.
In their study, Dr. Bairey Merz and her colleagues found that women's hearts were less likely than men's to lose their ability to pump blood after a heart attack, and that female heart patients were less likely to present with obstructive coronary artery disease.
Instead, the oxygen deprivation and subsequent damage to the heart is more likely to occur when small blood vessels, not major arteries, become dysfunctional.
"That is the reason women are often misdiagnosed and suffer adverse events," said Dr. Bairey Merz. "Physicians have been looking for male pattern disease, when we need to start looking at female patterns."
Likewise, more research is needed to develop appropriate treatments and reduce risk in women, she added.
According to Dr. Bairey Merz, the good news is that it is possible to measure damage to small blood vessels objectively. "The gold standard is reactivity testing, angiograms, and other physiologic measures, rather than anatomic study."
The study was recently presented at the Physiology of Cardiovascular Disease: Gender Disparities conference, at the University of Mississippi in Jackson. (ANI)
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