Newswise — There's more that's different about women's and men's hearts than the way they deal with love. It turns out that men and women develop, have symptoms of, are diagnosed with and are treated for heart disease very differently.
The GENESIS project, funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in partnership with the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, is a multi-disciplinary project that is bringing together researchers from across Canada to examine how sex and gender play a role in heart disease.
Their research has resulted in some fascinating findings:
o Teenaged boys develop higher blood pressure than teenage girls - something that may be due to puberty, or could be tied to the higher blood pressure seen in adult men. (Women don't catch up until after menopause, when their blood pressure tends to increase.)
o Women do not tend to experience the "chest-crushing" pain traditionally associated with heart attacks that men do. They (and many men with atypical symptoms) tend to experience fatigue and nausea instead.
o Angiograms, the tool used to diagnose heart problems when patients show up in hospitals with chest pains, tend to deliver a "normal" verdict for many women.
o While most drugs used to treat heart failure work in both women in men, some work better than others. For instance, while both are antihypertensive medications, ACE (angiotensin converting enzyme) inhibitors tend to work better for men, while ARBs (angiotensin receptor blockers) tend to work better for women.
What it all adds up to, says Louise Pilote, the lead investigator of GENESIS, is an increasing need to look as deeply at what divides us as at what we have in common when it comes to heart disease.
"It could be that, in the future, you choose a drug based on the sex of the patient," she says. "And maybe an angiogram isn't such a good test for diagnosing coronary disease in women."
As well, Dr. Pilote underscores the importance of women recognizing signs they could be having a heart attack, even if they are not the "typical" signs we read about, and get themselves to a hospital as quickly as possible.
Other studies now taking place as part of the GENESIS project are looking at alternative ways of testing for heart disease, tests that would recognize the disease in women equally as well as men. They are also examining whether genetic markers for hypertension and obesity, both of which can lead to heart disease, are different in women and men.
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