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Stress
Test Can Gauge Women's Heart Risk
Doctors hesitate to give women stress tests to diagnose
heart disease because the results can be misleading, but
a study said that a woman's stamina on the treadmill exam
can help gauge her risk.
Stress tests detect abnormal heartbeats in some women that
scientists believe are caused by hormonal differences between
women and men, and are not necessarily a sign of heart disease.
But focusing on a woman's fitness during the treadmill test
-- how long she can exercise as her heart beats faster and
the time it takes her heartbeat to return to normal after
she stops -- does predict her risk of eventually dying from
heart disease, said study author Samia Mora of Johns Hopkins
University in Baltimore.
In a 20-year followup study of nearly 3,000 women who took
treadmill tests in the 1970s, the women who performed below
average were 3.5 times more likely to die of heart disease
compared to those who performed better than average.
Unreliable stress test results sometimes require women to
undergo expensive followup tests to see if their heart abnormalities
were a sign of heart problems. Half of women with perceived
abnormalities on the stress test turn out not to have heart
disease.
In the report published in the Journal of the American Medical
Association, Mora concluded that regular exercise was more
important than losing weight, lowering blood pressure or
reducing cholesterol levels in lessening a woman's risk
of heart attack or stroke.
Heart disease kills one out of two U.S. women and two-thirds
die without having previously identifiable symptoms, the
study said.
"The stress test has been around for 30 years, but
for a long time it was thought to be not an effective test
of women's heart risk," said cardiologist Nieca Goldberg
of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.
"Why this is so important is it addresses the question
about the best way to assess heart risk in women,"
Goldberg, who was not involved in the study, said in a telephone
interview.
Another journal, Circulation, published a study earlier
found exercise capacity was more accurate at predicting
heart disease in women than in men.
Article Source: Reuters Health
Article Author: Andrew Stern
Net Reference 89
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