It is known that women have more heart attacks than men but a new study has found that women are even more prone to hospitalisation post-heart attack when compared to men. According to a study, women who are aged 55 or less have double the risk of being hospitalised than men of similar age. As part of the study, 2,979 patients were observed. Out of this, 2,007 were women and 972 were men and were in around 103 hospitals in the United States.
The study found that around 30 per cent of patients who were under observation were hospitalised again in the year after first leaving the hospital following a heart attack.
It was also noted that the number of re-visits to hospitals peaked within one month of a patient’s discharge. The number of visits slowly declined in subsequent months. The researchers found that women had nearly twice the risk of hospitalisation than men. To be precise, the chances of hospitalisation were 1.65 times higher.
Leading causes of re-hospitalisation were coronary-related complications
For men and women, the leading causes of re-hospitalisation were coronary-related complications — those such as heart attacks and angina that are related to blood vessel blockage. Despite this, the rate of coronary-related complications for women was nearly 1.5 times higher than that of men. This was driven in large part by risk factors such as obesity and diabetes.
The study revealed that the higher rates of risk factors such as obesity, heart failure, and depression among women most likely contributed to the disparity. The findings of the study have been published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
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“It has been observed for the first time that rehospitalisations post heart attacks in women aged 55 and younger are accompanied by certain non-cardiac factors, such as depression and low-income, that appear more common in women than men and are associated with more adverse outcomes,” said corresponding author Harlan M. Krumholz, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, in Connecticut, US.
