The whole "women die of heart disease more" is a bit of a misdirection. The premise of this article, "Researchers don't know why women are slightly more likely (22% vs. 18%) to die of a heart attack." is just silly.

Of course they know: Men get more heart attacks than women (by a huge margin) but they get them and die from them younger. So when older women have their first heart attack at age 72, they have other age factors in the mix.

Men's median first heart attack age is 65. Women's is 72. By age 70, over 30% of men will have already died. For women, only 18% have died. The women that do make it past that age and then have a heart attack, are more likely to die from it than the (on average) younger guys who present with a heart attack that same day.

40 percent of all American men aged 20 years and older have heart trouble. For women under the age of 64, only 13 percent have heart trouble. As of 2019, that's 55 million U.S. men with heart trouble vs. 17 million women.

From age 65 and up, women's incidence of heart trouble does go up, to 25%. But still nowhere near men's rate of heart trouble.

Here's the truth: Heart disease is the number one cause of death listed on the final forms for both men and women. But for women it's almost universally when they're already old, whereas for men, the spectre of dying young of "the big one" is all too real.

Put another way: CDC data (https://nccd.cdc.gov/DHDSPAtlas/Reports.aspx) shows that from 2016 to 2018 for people under the age of 75, more than twice as many men died of heart trouble than women did. (352,610 men died, vs. 174,352 women)

I'm all for effective treatment and preventing all possible deaths. If we see a gap that needs filled, we should. But concentrating our treatment efforts on 75 year old females at the expense of efforts directed at much younger men would be a sad mistake.

user:	bneumann
created:	May 2, 2017
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