Revisiting October’s Insights: Cardiovascular disease in women: understanding symptoms, risk factors, and management strategies

Increased recognition of the prevalence of traditional CVD risk factors, and their differential impact in women, as well as emerging, nontraditional risk factors unique to or more common in women, contribute to new understanding of mechanisms leading to these worsening outcomes for women. Unique aspects of CV health in women and sex and gender differences relate to clinical practice in the prevention, diagnosis, and treatment of CVD.

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Renata Główczyńska:   So, I suppose that this slide, this picture probably is one of the most famous one during this conference, for sure, what I noticed. So, there’s a wide spectrum of risk factors, risk factors for heart failure, so we see that the systemic inflammation, great vascular stiffness, emotional stress, significant comorbidity burden, what was mentioned previously, are more common in a woman. Also, there are some specific conditions only typical for women, like diabetes during pregnancy, hypertension during pregnancy, also cardiotoxicity of drugs during cancer therapy, like breast cancer treatment. So, that can be explanation, and kind of central hypothesis is done, that those risk factors are maybe attributable to the predisposition of women for heart failure with preserved ejection fraction. The most crucial factors are endothelial inflammation and coronary microvascular  dysfunction, which play the crucial role, key role in development of HFpEF in a woman. When in a man, in contrast, a coronary artery disease, myocardial infarction predominates as a risk factor, and as a result, in a man, we see more often a heart failure with reduced ejection fraction.