STAT: Heart Disease Will Arrive Sooner for Women by 2050
STAT recently interviewed C. Noel Bairey Merz, MD, director of the Barbra Streisand Women’s Heart Center in the Smidt Heart Institute at Cedars-Sinai, about American Heart Association (AHA) projections that over the next 25 years, heart disease will rise sharply among women—and at younger ages.
The forecast, published in the AHA journal Circulation, estimates that by 2050, 6 in 10 women will develop cardiovascular disease, with high blood pressure—the leading risk factor—affecting nearly as many females.
Bairey Merz, who was not involved in the paper, told STAT the outlook is especially concerning because other major drivers of heart disease—diabetes and obesity—are projected to increase. Nearly one-third of girls 2 to 19 are expected to face obesity by 2050. High blood pressure, obesity and diabetes also are stroke risk factors.
“That should be a wake-up call for us,” Bairey Merz said. “It’s alarming and it’s all preventable. That’s the sad reality.”
The projections estimate that by 2050, one-third of women between 22 and 44 will have a form of cardiovascular disease other than high blood pressure, compared with less than one-quarter currently. In that age group, diabetes prevalence is projected to rise from 6% to nearly 16%, and obesity is expected to increase by 18%, affecting 1 in 6 women.
Bairey Merz, a pioneer in women’s heart health research, told STAT gaps in sex-specific research have contributed to poorer outcomes for women with heart disease compared with men.
“I used to say we’re about 50 years behind the knowledge that we have in men about bypass surgery, about stents, about heart failure medications, about different kinds of procedures,” she said. “We’ve studied it now 25-plus years, so we have another 25 years to go.”
Read the complete article from STAT.