Women Have Higher Risk Of Fatal Occurrence After Cardiac Surgery.

2001 MAY 24 - (NewsRx Network) -- Women are more likely to develop a stroke after cardiac surgery than men, and their strokes are more likely to be fatal, researchers report the May 1, 2001, issue of the journal Circulation.

Researchers looked at a number of possibilities to explain why women have a higher perioperative stroke risk - smaller arteries, higher rates of high blood pressure, older age - and concluded that female gender was an "independent" risk factor. Perioperative indicates the time period just before, during, and shortly after surgery.

"There is something that predisposes women to stroke other than the traditionally known risk factors." says Charles W. Hogue, Jr., MD, the first author of the paper, and an associate professor of anesthesiology and chief of the cardiothoracic anesthesiology division at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, Missouri.

The study included more than 400,000 individuals who underwent cardiac surgery in the United States during 1996 and 1997. Thirty-two percent of the patients were women.

"We considered known risk factors including age, atherosclerosis, hypertension, diabetes, and the types of cardiac surgery," says Hogue. "Even when we adjusted for all that, we found female gender was an independent risk factor for stroke after heart surgery."

The study has important implications for the future because of the aging population in the U.S., notes Victor G. Davila-Roman, MD, the paper's senior author and medical director of the Washington University Cardiovascular Imaging and Clinical Research Core Laboratory. The number of Americans age 65 and older is expected to rise from about 35 million today, to more than 78 million in 2050.

"This implies that the number of elderly patients and women undergoing cardiac surgery is also likely to double over the next 50 years," says Davila-Roman. Currently, women comprise about one-third of all heart surgery patients.