Feb 18, 2019
Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and it's editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore. And I am so privileged to be joined by Senior Associate Editors whom I respect and admire so much. And they are Dr Biykem Bozkurt from Baylor College of Medicine and Dr Sana Al-Khatib from Duke University. And we have three woman discussing the Go Red for Women issue. Yes!
The current issue is the third Go Red for Women issue and boy, is it a bonanza issue. It tackles a wide spectrum of topics relating to cardiovascular disease in women, including prevention, risk stratification, myocardial infarction, pregnancy, heart failure, cardiac arrest, sudden cardiac death, and in so many wonderful formats; from original papers to systematic reviews, state-of-the-art papers, in-depth reviews, a research letter, and even frame of reference papers.
So, let’s get digging into this issue, shall we? And Biykem, we could start with you because I'd like to start with three original papers that really set the scene. The first discussed temporal changes and the very contemporary data from 2001 to 2016, describing cardiovascular risk factors and their treatment. And then the second focuses on young females with acute myocardial infarction. And the third on older women. Could you take us through these papers Biykem?
Dr Biykem Bozkurt: Lets first start looking at the sex differences through the Anne Haines Survey which enrolled more than 35000 patients. And they examined the trend all the way back from 2000 to 2016. Now the good news is the improvement in hypertension diabetes hyperlipidemia in woman were similar to men. So that's the good news. But BMI increased more in women than in men and overall, the ability to control blood pressure and diabetes hyperlipidemia appear to be a little bit better for women than in men.
But the concerning trend becomes apparent when we look at another paper that examined the twenty-year trend in young adults. Now, the first message is, and this is important for both genders, the proportion of the hospitalizations that are attributable to young patients, and young patients are defined as ages between 35 and 54 in this study, and this study was from Erik, increased from 1995 to 2014. So young patients appear to be having more in life compared to before, compared to 1990s and the 2000s. And that was actually partly due to the increasing prevalence of comorbidities, such as hypertension diabetes among young patients.
Now, interestingly among young patients, young women presenting with [inaudible] had a lower likelihood of receiving guideline directed therapy which, of course, sound familiar to our audience because we have the disparities of lower treatments and lower access to care in women with MI presentation compared to men. And unfortunately, again this will sound like the former news, the pre-hospital mortality was quite high in young women and has declined less in young women, compared to men.
So, the Erik study highlights the disparity for young women compared to young men. And then we have to recognize that most young patients in my hospitalization attributed to young patients is increasing. So this is probably a population that we need to be aware of. Regarding the older patients, there is a publication from the Opach Study looking at the sedentary behavior and cardiovascular disease in older women. And they looked at more than 5500 patients aged between 63 and all the way up until 97. And they looked at sedentary time and they looked at the duration of sedentary time all the way over eleven hours in some of the patients. And of course the higher the sedentary time was, the worse the cardiovascular disease risk was amongst the older women. So now we are recognizing that among older women, the post-menopausal or elderly women, the risk of cardiovascular disease rises with sedentary lifestyle.
And I think these three papers highlight the overall trend that we tend to see, maybe, better emphasis for comorbidity control. But at the same time we are now starting to recognize that in younger patients, especially in younger women the risk of MI is on the rise. And in older women, activity and remaining active and not having too much sedentary time are important to prevent cardiovascular disease.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Oh, Biykem, thank you for framing that so beautifully. So some good news, some bad news, and certainly some things we should be looking out for. You know, in another patient group that we always need to touch on when we talk about the Go Red for Women issue is pregnant women, or post-pregnancy. Could you comment, perhaps, on the systematic review that we have?
Dr Biykem Bozkurt: This is a very comprehensive, systematic review looking at the cardiovascular disease morbidity and mortality in women with a history of pregnancy complications. And they provide detailed systematic review and method analysis. It's becoming more apparent that the spectrum of cardiovascular disease ranges all the way from preeclampsia to arrythmia to pericardial myopathy. And we're recognizing this continuum both in the peripartum period, at the same time as the future risk. So those with preeclampsia and premature birth and delivery are associated with lifetime risk of cardiovascular disease. So, I think this paper is providing the right overview and a very comprehensive meta-analysis recognizing that pregnancy led to complications and morbidity and mortality in women.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Indeed. And it does just add so nicely to this issue, you know? Letting us know that we should watch out for the young women. We should watch out for the sedentary older women. And we should watch out for women with a history of pregnancy complications. But let’s switch tracks now. Sana, there was an amazing autopsy paper, actually, relating to sudden death in women. And as well as another original paper focusing on out of hospital cardiac arrest that is really very interesting. Would you like to tell us about those two?
Dr Sana Al-Khatib: Oh absolutely. I would love to. As someone who has devoted her life to the study of sudden cardiac death and you know, identifying factors, prevention. I really like that the paper looking at the risk of cardiac death in women and men. This study, Carolyn, was conducting in Finland, and the aim of the study was to determine autopsy findings and causes of death among women in a large population of sudden cardiac death.
They also were able to classify some EKG characteristics in men and women cardiac death victims. That really added helpful information. To do that, they systematically collected clinical and autopsy data from sudden cardiac death victims in Northern Finland between 1998 and 2017. So they actually had data on close to 5870 SCD victims. The findings were very interesting because they found that victims were significantly older than that. You know, so when they provided the median age it was 70 years for women versus 63 for men. So that was a significant difference there. And when they looked at the most frequently identified cause of death, they found that it was ischemic heart disease in both factions. Seventy two percent in women verses seventy six percent among men. And what was really striking about this was that the seventy two percent presence among women was higher than what had been reported in other theories.
They also reported that women were more likely to have lung ischemic cause of sudden cardiac death than men. It commented on the fact that primary myocardiac fibrosis was more likely to be found in woman victims rather than in men. And then they were able to identify some EKG factors stating that, in general, women were more likely to have a prior normal EKG than men. But that it increased the marker for sudden cardiac death with the presence of MDH with the polarization changes that were more commonly seen in women.
So, I thought that the findings were really interesting. They sure to be advance the field.
Dr Carolyn Lam: I couldn't agree more. Sex differences in sudden cardiac death. I don't think many people could tell you they knew much about it at all before this paper. And what about at a hospital cardiac arrest?
Dr Sana Al-Khatib: So, the other paper, which was really interesting, was a study that really looked at the public perception on why women receive less bystander CPR than men in out of hospital cardiac arrest. And this was an observation that was made a long time ago, Carolyn. So what's interesting for these investigators to be able to shed some light on this observation. What they did was they conducted a national survey of members of the public. And they were able to get 548 people to respond. Not a very high response rate, but pretty good for getting qualitative research studies. About fifty percent of the responders were women, so it was important to note that. And there was a good geographic distribution of the people; this was done in the U.S. And after they corrected their data, and they analyzed their data, the major thing emerged in terms of why the public perceived that women received less bystander CPR. The findings were really interesting.
The first finding was that people were concerned about being accused of sexual assault if they were to do CPR on the woman, which was interesting. Some actually were concerned that women were too weak or too frail. If they were to ever do CPR, might they cause any bone fractures, any injuries to the woman because they're more fragile, so to speak, than men. And their last theme was misperceptions about women in medical distress. What that meant was they felt that, well, you know, are women actually victims of sudden cardiac death? Yes, definitely, women can have sudden cardiac arrest and some people said, "Well, sometimes women can be overly dramatic and so maybe those presentations were not real presentations of sudden cardiac arrest," which I thought was really interesting.
I felt these were really interesting insights into why women don't receive CPR as much as men, and hopefully future interventions can be targeting these misconceptions or these concerns that the public has about doing CPR on women.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Isn't that so intriguing. The misconception that women are either too shy, too frail, or too dramatic. Oh my goodness. Anyway, that was all the original papers, which were fantastic. But I have to admit that one of the things that I love most about the Go Red for Women issues is that it talks about women in cardiology. And Biykem, you've always been such a huge mentor to me. And what I love about this issue is that there are a few papers, aren't there, that actually focus on the importance of this mentorship. Could you tell us about that?
Dr Biykem Bozkurt: It's a very important concept that I think is underlying a few papers in our issue. The first one is women in cardiology and perhaps the lack of increase in the representation of women in cardiology. Even though women make up about half of our medical graduates, among practicing cardiologists women comprise less than about twelve to fifteen percent of the population. That perhaps disparity hasn't changed in the last two decades. We tend to sometimes compare our profession to the surgical field, and I think gender inequality appears to be a little bit similar to general surgery and orthopedic.
But the paper by Ziman underlines the following: Even though our gender inequality is similar to the surgical field, to look at the temporal trends there has been a significant rise in female representation in general surgery. And actually, among medical trainees, about one third of the medical trainees, not fifty percent like us, one third of the medical trainees are in surgical fields after they go to medical school. But the female representation has been steadily increasing in the surgical fields; about three-fold out of cardiology. Whereas female representation cardiology has the main slot, so the surgical fields are doing a better job in either welcoming, supporting, and mentoring their female trainees than the cardiology field.
This is an important concept for us to recognize, and usually the disparity reasons are perceived to be gender and lifestyle and/or personal preferences. That doesn't appear to be the case. Perhaps the better role models and better mentorship could eliminate this disparity and this is underlined in the Olmein Mein paper by Ziman.
Another paper by Sharon Hunt also underlines this concept. She portrays the woman needed in cardiac transplantation from a historical and personal perspective, and underlines the following: We tend to have a large number of woman leaders in advance heart failure and cardiac transplantation. And part of this may be attributed to the fact that women have been part of the fabric, part of the readership, part of the group that has developed the field and has been practicing. And thus, there has not been a nation or incorporation of the women in the field. And thus, since they've been involved in the practice from the beginning, they have been seen as a natural partner. Even though cardiac transplantation is quite demanding, requires bedside presence, and hours which are usually used as a reason for women not to go into certain fields, such as interventional. In transplant, we don't seem to have that much disparity for women. Women tend to select this field on one of the reasons in Sharon Hunt's piece is identified as being part of the team from the beginning, and having good role models and mentors.
And finally, there is a research letter that identifies if the corresponding author is a female author. There is a large representation of co-authors. This is a very interesting finding by Ouyang stating that even though the female to male senior authorship rates have not been different over the years, if the senior author or the corresponding author is a female there tends to be a higher number of co-authors. This may suggest that female corresponding authors are able to mentor or include their partners or team members. Or vice versa, female co-authors may feel more invited and incorporated as a team. So, this paper also underlines that women in leadership positions connected to cardiology may serve as positive role models to recruit and retain talented junior female investigators.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Ah, indeed, indeed, indeed. So many topics that come close to my own heart. But Sana, among the numerous other papers here, we have two state of the art papers, two in-depth reviews, there are three frame of reference papers. Which one, or ones, stood out to you?
Dr San Al-Khatib: One important paper, Carolyn, you certainly mentioned is an online paper that was titled "Why are Young Black Women as High Risk for Cardiovascular Disease". I personally like this paper a lot because it highlights such an important issue that has great impact on public health. And sometimes the population of young black women may go unrecognized in terms of their risk of cardiovascular disease and what have you. So really the On My Mind paper tackles what are these things that are driving the worsening cardiovascular disease trends in this patient population. And what can we do about it? And they talk about how the awareness of heart disease and the leading cause of death among these women is actually more among black patients. And so, they talk about the need to really implement multi-level strategies to try to address this, raise awareness, identify disparities in care. They even also call for really investing in black women scientists.
And so, this was such a really good paper and I'm sure that the readers will enjoy it as much as I have.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Oh, thank you so much for that, Sana. That really, really makes for such a rich issue with such a lot of different papers. We're running out of time, so we don't even have the opportunity to really discuss, but I want to mention these so that the listeners will look out for them. Beyond the papers we've already discussed, we have state-of-the-art papers on cardiovascular care in women veterans and the management of cardiovascular disease in women with breast cancer. We even have two in-depth reviews. One on sex differences in advance heart failure therapies and a second on the role of breast arterial calcification in cardiovascular risk stratification in women. And finally, there's a research letter on the size of thoracic aortic aneurysms in women. So many papers, such a beautiful, beautiful issue. I just want to thank you both Sana and Biykem for leading this beautiful Go Red for Women issue.
Thank you, listeners, for joining us today. You've been listening to Circulation on the Run. Don't forget to tune in again next week.
This program is copyright American Heart Association 2019.