OESTROGEN AND HEART DISEASE
‘The fact is that women are relatively protected, in terms of their cardiovascular status, by having oestrogens. It’s relative because it’s true as long as they have oestrogens. After the menopause, however, the incidence of heart disease rises rapidly, parallel to that in men; and as everybody knows, women live on average seven years longer. While men may have a head start, women have a higher chance of living widowed and with serious cardiovascular disease.’
Another unpalatable reality is that the causes and the most effective prevention *and treatment strategies for heart disease in women are still being learned, whereas they are well established for men with heart disease. This discrepancy relates to the male focus of much heart disease research, a fact that concerns health authorities in many countries. ‘Women die of heart disease almost as often as men do, but later in their lives,’ says Judith Dwyer, who chairs the Women’s Health Committee of Australia’s major health watchdog, the National Health and Medical Research Council. ‘It is surely inexcusable to base clinical advice on data that is good for the gander but may be worse than useless for the goose, even if that data is easier to gather.’
Judith Dwyer says the exclusion of women as participants in heart research is longstanding and ingrained in the system that governs trials of new pharmaceuticals. ‘Drug companies in Australia are almost required to use only healthy, young male volunteers when testing new formulations,’ she says. ‘It seems to me to be perfectly possible to develop methods of avoiding many of the perceived problems, such as the danger of liability in the case of pregnancy in women.’ In a bid to overcome the problem, a new approach has been devised to redress this kind of imbalance in Australian heart research.
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