Healthy Considerations

Every year more women die from heart attacks and strokes than men. This is the primary reason the American Heart Association is updating it’s heart disease prevention guidelines in women.

The 2007 Guidelines for Preventing Cardiovascular Disease in Women – published in a special womens health issue of Circulation: Journal of the American Heart Association – also include new directions for using aspirin, hormone therapy and vitamin and mineral supplements in heart disease and stroke prevention in women.

“The updated guidelines emphasize the lifetime risk of women, not just the more short-term focus of the 2004 guidelines,” said Lori Mosca, M.D., Ph.D., director of preventive cardiology at New York–Presbyterian Hospital and chair of the American Heart Association expert panel that wrote the guidelines. “We took a long-term view of heart disease prevention because the lifetime risk of dying of cardiovascular disease (CVD) is nearly one in three for women. This underscores the importance of healthy lifestyles in women of all ages to reduce the long-term risk of heart and blood vessel diseases.”

The new guidelines include expanded recommendations on lifestyle factors such as physical activity, nutrition and smoking cessation, as well as more in-depth recommendations on drug treatments for blood pressure and cholesterol control.

Furthermore, guidelines on hormone and aspirin therapy and antioxidant and folic acid supplements are revised based on recently published data.

“Since the last guidelines were developed, more definitive clinical trials became available to suggest that healthcare providers should consider aspirin in women to prevent stroke,” Mosca said. “In addition, providers should not use menopausal therapies such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs) such as raloxifene or tamoxifene to prevent heart disease because they have been shown to be ineffective in protecting the heart and may increase the risk of stroke.”

You can learn more about the guidelines here: American Heart Association

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