Men’s heart attack risk can start to increase in their mid-thirties — about seven years earlier than women, a study suggests.
Researchers have consistently found men experience heart disease earlier than women, but over the past several decades risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure and diabetes have become similar between the sexes.
However, researchers found this gap had not narrowed when it comes to coronary heart disease — which can lead to heart attacks.
Coronary heart disease is the most commonly diagnosed type of heart disease. It is the most common cause of heart attack and is the single biggest killer of both men and women worldwide, according to the British Heart Foundation (BHF).
The studies findings suggest that heart disease prevention and screening should start earlier in adulthood.
“That timing may seem early, but heart disease develops over decades, with early markers detectable in young adulthood,” said study senior author Alexa Freedman, assistant professor of preventive medicine at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
“Screening at an earlier age can help identify risk factors sooner, enabling preventive strategies that reduce long-term risk,” she added.
The thirty year US study led by Northwestern Medicine enrolled more than 5,100 Black and white healthy adults aged 18 to 30 in the mid-1980s and followed them through 2020.
It revealed men start developing coronary heart disease earlier than women with differences emerging at around age 35.
Men reached 5 per cent incidence of cardiovascular disease about seven years earlier than women aged 50 versus 57 years.
The difference was driven largely by coronary heart disease. Men reached a 2 per cent incidence of coronary heart disease more than a decade earlier than women, while rates of stroke were similar and differences in heart failure emerged later in life.
The scientists examined whether differences in blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, smoking, diet, physical activity and body weight could explain the earlier onset of heart disease in men.
While some factors, particularly hypertension, explained part of the gap, overall cardiovascular health did not fully account for the difference, suggesting other biological or social factors may be involved.
Researchers found that men and women had similar cardiovascular risk through their early 30s, but at 35, men’s risk began to rise faster and stayed higher through midlife.
Heart disease screening and prevention efforts often focus on adults over 40, for example the NHS offers a free check-up of your heart and blood vessel health between the ages of 40 and 74. But these new findings suggest that approach may miss an important window.
“Our findings suggest that encouraging preventive care visits among young men could be an important opportunity to improve heart health and lower cardiovascular disease risk,” Dr Freedman said.
