Women Face Higher Heart Disease Risk from Lifestyle Factors, Study Finds
New Canadian research shows that poor diet, lack of exercise, and other key health risks impact women more severely than men.
Watan-It has long been known that certain lifestyle and health factors increase the risk of heart disease, but a new study confirms that these factors may have a greater impact on women than on men.
Researchers from the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto found that eight specific factors appear to double the risk of heart disease in women compared to men.
These eight factors are:
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Diet
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Sleep quality
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Physical activity
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Smoking
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Body Mass Index (BMI)
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Blood sugar levels
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Cholesterol levels (lipids)
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Blood pressure
Tracking Long-Term Heart Health
The study analyzed data from more than 175,000 Canadian adults who did not have pre-existing heart conditions. Participants were followed starting in 2009, with researchers tracking the presence of the eight risk factors and checking whether participants developed heart disease 11 years later.
The cardiovascular conditions included in the study were:
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Heart attacks
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Strokes
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Unstable angina (chest pain due to reduced blood flow to the heart)
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Peripheral artery disease (narrowing of blood vessels in the arms or legs)
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Heart failure
Key findings:
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A higher percentage of women (9.1%) had ideal heart health compared to men (4.8%).
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Women were also less likely to experience health deterioration (21.9% vs. 30.5% for men).
Greater Impact on Women
However, the study showed that women with poor health due to any of the eight risk factors were nearly five times more likely to develop heart disease compared to women in ideal health.
By contrast, men with poor health were 2.5 times more likely to develop heart disease than those in ideal health.
Lead researcher Manish Sood stated:“Our study shows that the risk of heart disease associated with each of these eight factors was higher in women than in men.”
He added:“We found that women tend to have better overall health than men, but these specific risk factors reverse that advantage.”
The researchers concluded that “gender-specific screening and risk assessment methods” could more accurately predict heart disease risk across populations.
