Young women with heart attack have lesser chance of surviving than men

Washington: Younger women are more likely to die in the hospital after a heart attack as compared with younger men, a new large-scale study led by an Indian-origin researcher has found.

Researchers from Yale School of Medicine analysed 230,684 hospitalisations for heart attack in patients age 30 to 54 from a total of 1.1 million hospitalisations reported in a national database from 2001 to 2010 in the US.

They found that women have longer hospital stays and are more likely than men to die in the hospital after a heart attack.

Men were more likely to have high cholesterol while women, especially black women, were more likely to also have hypertension, diabetes and heart failure, researchers said.

"Younger women are a vulnerable yet understudied group with worse cardiac risk profiles and worse outcomes after a heart attack as compared with younger men," Gupta said.

The authors concluded that younger women may benefit from more aggressive control of modifiable cardiovascular risk factors, including early identification and treatment of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, smoking, and diabetes.

The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.