Studies show that women lose more years than men

The long-term health consequences of heart attacks, including their impact on life expectancy, are well known. But do they affect men and women differently? Scientists have found that women lose more years of life after a heart attack than men.

Researchers from Karolinska Institutet and Danderyd Hospital examined the life expectancy of 335,000 heart attack survivors and compared them with 1.6 million people without heart attacks. The heart attack survivors were part of the SWEDEHEART quality registry from 1991 to 2022. Data on robust individuals were collected from Statistics Sweden and the National Board of Health and Welfare.

According to the results test The study, published in the journal Circulation, found that women experienced a greater loss in life expectancy than men, and the effect was more significant in people with impaired heart function following a heart attack.

“We found that there were immense differences between the groups. Women and juvenile people lost the most life expectancy when they had a heart attack. If heart function was impaired after the heart attack, the effects were even greater. For example, a 50-year-old woman with impaired heart function would lose an average of 11 years in 2022 compared with an 80-year-old man with normal heart function who would lose an average of 5 months of life expectancy,” said first author Christian Reitan in Press Release.

To more accurately measure the impact of heart attack, researchers took into account factors such as differences in income, education, other diseases and medications.

“The results showed that a fairly immense part of the reduction in life expectancy disappeared, meaning that a significant part of the reduction in life expectancy could be explained by factors other than the heart attack itself, but which could still be related to the heart attack, such as socioeconomic factors or other diseases such as hypertension and diabetes. Assuming the patient retained heart function, we saw that the sex difference disappeared,” Reitan said.

“We interpret this to mean that the impact of heart attack, and therefore care for heart attack, is similar in both sexes, and the immense reduction in life expectancy that we see in women is due to differences in risk factors, other diseases and socioeconomic conditions,” Reitan added.

The researchers believe their findings will lend a hand understand the impact on life expectancy, identify high-risk groups and provide information to lend a hand improve future care planning.