American College of Cardiology: Bad habits have greater impact on cardiovascular risk in women than men, study finds

Researchers at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto, Canada have found that poor diet, poor sleep, smoking, and other unhealthy lifestyle factors have a greater impact on the risk of cardiovascular disease in women than in men. The findings of this study were presented on the website of the American College of Cardiology.

The researchers analyzed data from over 175,000 Canadian adults who enrolled in the Province of Ontario Health Study between 2009 and 2017. None of the participants had heart disease at baseline and about 60% were women.

The study focused on eight factors associated with heart disease: diet, sleep, physical activity, smoking, body mass index, blood glucose, lipids, and blood pressure.

The study participants were divided into groupings depending on their health status for each aforesaid risk factor. Volunteers with ideal scores on all eight factors were classified as optimal health, those with intermediate scores—in the average health grouping, and those with the worst scores—in the poor health grouping.

The participants were monitored for a median follow-up period of just over 11 years. Over these years, the researchers tracked the incidence of seven heart disease outcomes—heart attack, stroke, unstable angina (chest pain that results from restricted blood flow to the heart), peripheral arterial disease (narrowed blood vessels in the arms or legs), heart failure, coronary revascularization (procedures to open blocked arteries) and cardiovascular death—among participants in each of the three groupings.

As expected, the volunteers in the second and third groupings suffer from cardiovascular diseases more often. However, this was more pronounced in women. Women with poor health had nearly five times the risk of heart disease as women with ideal health, while men with poor health had 2.5 times the risk of heart disease as men with ideal health.

Further study is needed to understand how each factor might be affecting outcomes differently in men and women based on either biological or sociocultural factors, the researchers said.