Findings of a new study suggest that heart attacks may have a bigger impact on the life expectancy of women and blacks compared with white men.
Emily Bucholz, from the Yale School of Public Health, explained that while both men and women appear to live equally long after suffering from a heart attack, women normally have longer life spans than men so they should also live longer after a heart attack.
For their new study published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, Bucholz and colleagues looked at the data of over 140,000 Medicare beneficiaries who were admitted to the hospital because of a heart attack anytime between 1994 and 1995. Half of these patients, who were 76 years old on average, were women and less than a tenth of them were black.
The researchers found that white men and women who were hospitalized because of heart attack when they were 70 years old lived on average about nine years after the attack. Black men and women who were hospitalized at the same age, however, only lived about seven years.
Bucholz and colleagues found that women lose 5.5 years from their expected life whereas men lose around 2.5 years of expected life. Whites, on the other hand, lose about 4.5 years of life and blacks lose about 5.5 years. African-Americans were also more likely to have more severe heart attacks and more heart failure afterward.
Bucholz said that the disparity may account for the difference between the blacks and whites. She said that the blacks were sicker when they were hospitalized and were not treated the same as the whites. Diabetes, for instance, is more prevalent in blacks to start with, which indicates that their population is sicker compared with that of the white patients.
Dr. Jack Tu, from the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, said that it is disconcerting that the results of the study suggest there is racial disparity when it comes to being treated in the hospital, with blacks receiving fewer treatments such as bypass surgery, angioplasty and clot-busting drugs.
"This study reiterates that these disparities still exist, and we can do better," Bucholz said.
As for the difference between the life expectancy of men and women after a heart attack, the researchers said that they are not sure why such difference exists, albeit they said that biological difference may be a possible reason.
Photo: Danielle Elder | Flickr
