Friday, August 12, 2011

Cigarettes Hurt Women's Hearts More than Men's




By Chris Kaiser, Cardiology Editor, MedPage Today
Published: August 11, 2011
Reviewed by Zalman S. Agus, MD; Emeritus Professor
University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine and
Dorothy Caputo, MA, RN, BC-ADM, CDE, Nurse Planner




  • Note that a large meta-analysis indicates a higher relative risk of coronary heart disease for women smokers, with an additional increase in the female-to-male relative risk ratio for every additional year of smoking.
  • Point out that the underlying mechanisms by which smoking might be more hazardous in female smokers are unclear, but the authors suggest one possibility is that women might extract a greater quantity of toxic agents from cigarettes than men.
Women who smoke have a greater risk of developing coronary artery disease than men who smoke, a large systematic review and meta-analysis showed.
Compared with nonsmokers, women smokers have a 25% greater relative risk of coronary heart disease than do men who smoke, independent of other cardiovascular risk factors, reported Rachel R. Huxley, DPhil, from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and Mark Woodward PhD, from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.
The relative risk increased by 2% for every additional year of study follow-up, which "lends support to the idea of a pathophysiological basis for the sex difference," according to the study published online in The Lancet

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