How personalized care benefits gender equality in cardiovascular health

Achieving gender equality Cardiovascular care According to the research presented on, it may require attention to the individuality of care, especially for women American College of Cardiology (ACC) 2023 Annual Scientific Sessions in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The results indicated that women with premature coronary artery disease (CAD) had a higher incidence of major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) at 1 year compared with men.

Co-author of the study, Birgit Vogel, MD, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai Hospital, emphasized the importance of recognizing the underestimation of the risk in women and increasing screening tests to identify and address the early risks of heart disease.

“At Mount Sinai, we just opened the Women’s Coronary Artery Center and it’s a big target of ours to increase screening in young women, especially if there are certain risks like women with a history of bad pregnancy outcomes,” he said. “We look for risk factors and later heart disease.” We will get them the treatment they need to reduce the risk.”

In question and answer HCPLMount Sinai author Alexandra Murphy MBBS discussed the findings, noting that gender-specific differences in quality of care and natural limitations included in the analysis did not diminish the findings.

This Q&A has been edited for clarity.

Can you take the inspiration behind this study and provide a brief description of the results?

So, at Mount Sinai, and at the Icahn Institute, we’ve focused a lot on gender equity research and the disparities between cardiovascular disease in women and men and women. This is important to identify these types of differences in order to try and improve women with cardiovascular disease.

In this abstract, we looked at younger patients, so that is defined differently between men and women. Men under 55 years of age and women under 65 years of age who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in our hospital between 2012 and 2019. We have prepared a large amount of research with very high quality research.

We then stratified these young patients by sex, and identified the main risk factors for poor outcomes. We defined the primary outcome as major adverse cardiovascular events. And of the more than 4,000 patients we studied, less than half were women.

And we found that these women are older than men, even in that younger age bracket. They are more likely to have a higher body mass index (BMI), and also have a higher comorbidity burden. But when we break it down and look at the different risk factors that are most prominent in men and women, we find that there are differences, and this information is important because it can be used to target six specific guidelines to improve results. In both men and women.

To your final point, would you say this is the most important takeaway from the clinical perspective?

Absolutely. And I think we should always be thinking about how we can apply the findings of our research to change health outcomes for our patients. It’s about getting from the database to the clinical department. And I think the most important thing here is to improve public awareness and improve the prevention of heart disease by targeting specific characteristics that are unique to women.

Are these findings the result of physiological differences, the quality of care given to women, or a combination of both?

I believe there is a mixture of reasons here. First, consider the differences and differences in how women with cardiovascular disease present, including symptoms that are often underdiagnosed and underdiagnosed, leading to poor outcomes for women without knowing they have a heart attack. We can enter. or chest pain that appears differently.

Secondly, we need to examine the bias that doctors may have against women during the diagnosis or treatment of cardiovascular disease. This is a common issue in research related to women’s health. Finally, we can address more effective public health campaigns and awareness campaigns to highlight the importance of diversity and progress.

Are there inherent limitations that you would like our audience to consider before interpreting study results?

I think that when we look at retrospective analysis of a database, we have to understand that there are limitations to that data. In theory, randomized data will always be of high quality. But looking at such a large crowd, I think that’s still a very strong message. It allows us to look at consecutive patients and find out what the disease burden is and better understand the differences. And that can still be done with very high quality in large databases, even if it is retrospective in nature.