Men and women suffer from different types of cardiovascular problems related to stress, a new study finds.
The study was conducted by researchers from the Duke Heart Center, who examined 56 women and 254 men diagnosed with heart disease. Each of the participants had enrolled in a larger REMIT study to see the impact of the medication escitalopram on heart disease induced by mental stress.
The men and women underwent baseline testing on three mentally stressful tasks, including a mental arithmetic test, a mirror tracing test and an anger recall test. Following this, they were made to take a treadmill test. Researchers also conducted echocardiography to study changes in the heart, took blood samples, and measured blood pressure and heart rate during the mental stress tasks and rest periods between tests.
Researchers were surprised to find that while men had more changes in blood pressure and heart rate in response to the mental stress, more women experienced myocardial ischemia: decreased blood flow to the heart. Researchers also noted that women experienced increased platelet aggregation. This is known to be the start of the formation of blood clots and was more prominent in women than men. Women also displayed a greater increase in negative emotions during the mental stress tests.
"The relationship between mental stress and cardiovascular disease is well known," said lead author Zainab Samad, assistant professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, North Carolina. "This study revealed that mental stress affects the cardiovascular health of men and women differently. We need to recognize this difference when evaluating and treating patients for cardiovascular disease."
"At this point, further studies are needed to test the association of sex differences in the heart's responses to mental stress and long term outcomes," Samad continued. "This study also underscores the inadequacy of available risk prediction tools, which currently fail to measure an entire facet of risk, i.e. the impact of negative physiological responses to psychological stress in both sexes, and especially so among women."
Findings of the study were published online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
