With Dress Red Day on Sunday, September 29, the Heart Foundation is calling for more attention to male-female differences in cardiovascular disease research. If researchers do include these differences, diagnosis and treatment of heart disease in women will improve. This is also the plea of UMC Utrecht researchers Hester den Ruijter and Sophie Bots.
According to the Heart Foundation, men and women are still lumped together when it comes to scientific research into cardiovascular diseases. This is evident from research conducted by the UMC Utrecht. Clinical studies of prescription drugs for heart failure have often not reported the side effects of these drugs separately for men and women, describe Hester den Ruijter and Sophie Bots in the journal Circulation. A more comprehensive analysis of literature on medication for heart failure in JACC Heart failure shows a similar pattern: the data are presented for men and women together, while men and women with heart failure are obviously different.
Hester and Sophie looked at a total of 23 clinical trials and 155 observational studies. Of the 23 clinical trials, 2 reported the adverse events for men and women separately (9%). In the observational studies, 11 out of 155 (7%) did. “More global knowledge about gender-specific side effects of heart failure medication in academia is necessary, Hester and Sophie emphasize, concluding. Ultimately, that knowledge will lead to better care because practitioners can better tailor their medication choices to the patient.”
About 230 thousand people in the Netherlands live with heart failure, of whom slightly more than half are women (125 thousand). When women take the same medication for cardiovascular disease, they are about one and a half times more at risk of side effects than men. Some of these side effects can be life-threatening, such as the occurrence of an arrhythmia. But side effects that may not seem threatening at first glance, such as persistent dry cough, can also cause a patient to discontinue the medication.
On Sunday, September 29, it will be Dress Red Day for the 10th time.
On this day, the Heart Foundation calls attention to cardiovascular disease in women. More research is still needed. The Heart Foundation is therefore committed this year to raise an additional 3 million euros for new research into women and cardiovascular disease. With this, it wants to improve the quality of scientific research into cardiovascular disease in women and the care of women with cardiovascular disease. From 2015, all researchers who receive money from the Heart Foundation must always investigate whether there are male-female differences.
Hester den Ruijter is principal investigator of Experimental Cardiology at UMC Utrecht. She does scientific research on the differences in cardiovascular disease between men and women, with special attention to the female heart. Sophie Bots is doing her PhD research on male-female differences in heart failure at the Experimental Cardiology research team at UMC Utrecht. The research was co-funded by the Heart Foundation and ZonMW.
