BALTIMORE, Dec. 16 (UPI) -- One-third of coronary heart disease cases in women are slipping through traditional risk screening.
So concludes a new report released by cardiologists at Johns Hopkins University Friday, which says that commonly used CHD risk-factor criteria fail to identify approximately one-third of women likely to develop the disease.
CHD is the leading cause of death in women in the United States, the researchers said, and while the CHD death rate among men has declined in the last 20 years, the death rate for women has held steady in that same time period.
The study -- appearing in the online American Heart Journal -- casts doubt on the traditional test for early detection of CHD, the Framingham Risk Estimate, which seeks to predict whether a person is likely to have a heart attack within 10 years, based on factors including age, blood pressure, blood-cholesterol levels and smoking.
However, many women in the study classified as low risk for CHD using the FRE test turned out to be at significantly higher risk after having a CT-scan diagnostic test, noted Johns Hopkins Researcher Roger Blumenthal.
In fact, the researchers found that 98 percent of the women -- with an average age of 50 -- were given FRE scores of less than 6 percent, but after getting CT-scans, one-third of these "very low risk" women actually had coronary atherosclerosis, a hardening and narrowing of the arteries that can lead to heart attacks if not controlled with drug therapy along with diet, exercise and other lifestyle changes.
What's more, 12 percent of women in the study had advanced stages of atherosclerosis, while another 6 percent had severe calcium build-up, the researchers said.
