Study: Women's life expectancy drops more than men's after heart attack

Women lose more years of life after a heart attack than men, a new study shows.

Heart attacks are one of the most common causes of death worldwide and have a significant impact on the life expectancy of the population.

Understanding the impact of disease on life expectancy is important for identifying high-risk groups, while also providing important insights for improving future care planning.

The new study, led by researchers at Karolinska Institutet and Danderyd Hospital, examined data on 335,000 individuals who suffered a myocardial infarction between 1991 and 2022.

Individuals with myocardial infarction were compared with 1.6 million people without myocardial infarction using data from Statistics Sweden and the National Board of Health and Welfare.

Using new statistical methods, the difference in life expectancy between individuals who have a heart attack and individuals in a comparison group can be calculated, providing a measure of how much life expectancy has been shortened by the disease.

“We found that there were significant differences between the groups. Women and young people lost the most life expectancy when they had a heart attack. If heart function was damaged after the infarction, the effects were even greater. For example, a 50-year-old woman with poor heart function lost an average of 11 years in 2022 compared to an 80-year-old man with normal heart function who lost an average of 5 months of life expectancy,” says the study’s first author, Christian Reitan, a researcher at the Department of Clinical Sciences, Danderyd Hospital, Karolinska Institutet.

During the study, the researchers took into account differences in income, education, other diseases and medications at the time of the illness, which helped measure the impact of a heart attack more accurately.

“The results showed that a fairly large part of the reduction in life expectancy disappeared,” Reitan explained. “That is, much of the reduction in life expectancy could be explained by factors other than the heart attack itself, but that may still be related to heart attacks, such as socioeconomic status or other diseases such as high blood pressure and diabetes, provided the patient maintains heart function. And we saw that the gender difference disappeared.”

"We interpret this to mean that the impact of a heart attack, and therefore heart attack care, is similar between the sexes and that the larger reduction in life expectancy we see in women is due to differences in other risk factors, diseases and socioeconomics," he continued.