A new study has revealed that young women with diabetes have a six-fold risk of having a heart attack.
The study also found that young women who had a heart attack (myocardial infarction, MI) were more likely to be smokers than older women with MI.
Author Hanna Szwed of the Institute of Cardiology Warsaw said that cardiovascular diseases affected mainly the elderly, but for many years an increase in incidence has been observed in young people as well, regardless of gender.
The study in 7,386 women assessed the effect of risk factors on MI incidence in young women and assessed differences related to age. Multivariate analysis showed that four out of five classic risk factors were independent predictors of MI in young women. The strongest was diabetes which increased MI risk by six-fold. Arterial hypertension increased risk by four times while hypercholesterolemia tripled risk and current smoking increased risk by 1.6 times.
Szwed said that the lack of a correlation with obesity could be because of the overwhelming influence of diabetes in this population. The researchers found that young healthy women had an average of 1.1 risk factors, while young MI patients had 1.7 and older women with MI had 2.0.
Compared to young healthy women, young women with MI more often had arterial hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and diabetes and were current or past smokers.
Szwed concluded that at present there were not enough global scientific reports focused on the problem of coronary heart disease in young populations, particularly in women.
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