Smoking worse for women
Reported September 02, 2008
“Our research clearly shows there’s a gender difference between the damage tobacco does to the blood vessels in and around the heart,” Dr. Morten Grundtvig, a heart specialist from Lillehammer, told newspaper Aftenposten. “Women are harmed more than men.”
He and professors Terje P Hagen and Åsmund Reikvam of the University of Oslo based their research on 1,784 persons who were admitted to hospital in Norway for heart attacks from 1998 to 2005.
Their studies showed that women who smoked on average suffered heart attacks 14 years earlier than women who never had smoked. Men who smoked, meanwhile, experienced heart attacks on average six years earlier than non-smoking men.
The difference arose after the researchers took into consideration other known risk factors for heart attacks, such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and earlier strokes or angina.
The researchers, who were to present their findings at a major European conference in Munich on Tuesday, are challenged in explaining why women have lower tolerance for nicotine than men. But Grundtvig claims that women who smoke lose all the advantages of being a woman.
Women continue to experience heart attacks seven years later than men, on average. Smoking, Gundtvig notes, reduces the level of the female hormone estrogen, which in turn can help prevent heart attacks. Female smokers can thus go into menopause earlier than non-smoking women.
The number of smokers in Norway has declined considerably in the past 20 years, but there are still as many as 900,000 who haven’t kicked the habit, and slightly more of them are women than men.