Heart Disease In Women

 

Heart disease is the No. 1 killer of women and their doctors often underestimate the risk, because they think it's something more likely to strike men. Women aren't getting nearly the same kind of preventative care that more receive; only 36 percent of open heart surgery and 33 percent of angioplasty are performed on women. The new guidelines are intended to right the historical gender inequity in treating heart disease, which kills 500,000 women in the United States each year and millions more worldwide. Doctors find it difficult to diagnose heart disease in women because available tests are less effective for them than for men. The basic stress test, for instance, is less accurate in women because they, by nature, have more electrical abnormalities in their body system that could be misinterpreted as heart malfunction. Also, their breast tissue may be too dense to give a correct reading of cardiac activity. The female body, meanwhile, responds differently to a treatment. Aspirin therapy, a common recommendation for at-risk men to thin the blood and prevent clots, is more likely to cause bleeding and stroke in women. Aspirin is recommended for all high-risk and some intermediate -risk women but not for those at low risk. Women's hearts and arteries are smaller than men's, which makes them potentially easier to clog. For this reason, they are also harder to operate on, which possibly explains the higher mortality rate among women than men for bypass surgery. It's also important to correct any misconceptions about prevention. One recent study showed a lot of women still believed that vitamins E, C, and A, and aromatherapy prevent heart disease, but there is no evidence that they do. The point is people have their beliefs about their care. But preventive and therapeutic measures should be based on science, not on belief. The guidelines state clearly that vitamin supplements and hormone therapy are not recommended as prevention for women.

Cardiovascular diseases have always been on the rise in the history of mankind and as we go into the future, advances in the field of measurement and treatment of these heart diseases must follow suit. Most of the research goes on in the treatment of the disease today, which is a good sign, but the initial step of diagnosing the disease needs a step up in its progress. There have been many advances in imaging techniques today than before enabling precise and non-invasive diagnosis of the disease. Some of them are Cardiac computed tomography (CT), Cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR), echocardiography, nuclear cardiac stress testing, and Cardiac positron emission testing. Echocardiography is used to define cardiac functioning. Exercise and pharmacologic nuclear stress testing is widely used for the diagnosis and risk stratification of patients with known or suspected coronary heart disease. Cardiac MR is exceptional for evaluating structural heart disease and cardiac functioning, but not for CHD. Cardiac CT has come out as one of the healthy imaging services. Cardiac Computed tomography (CT) is originally? EMI SCAN? as was developed at the research center of a company called EMI. It was later on called Computed axial tomography (CT scan). The word tomography comes from Greek tomos (slice) and graphein (write). CT scan is an imaging method utilizing tomography where digital geometry processing is used to produce a 3-dimensional image of the internal parts of an object with the help of a large number of series of 2-dimensional X-ray images which are taken around a single axis of rotation. It gives us a volume of data that can be stored and also manipulated through Windowing. Modern-day scanners allow this data to be reframed in numerous planes and even as 3D representations of structures. CT is also used in other fields other than health care. More than half of the patients have death or myocardial infarction as the predictor of Coronary artery disease (CAD). Traditional risk-prediction systems often can't predict the development of CAD in a patient or further complications. Coronary artery?Calcium scoring? CT is used to detect coronary artery calcium. It has its own limitations in not identifying soft and noncalcified plaque which may pose a greater risk of CAD. Cardiac CT angiography crosses this barrier and uses intravenous contrast to fill the lumen like the usual invasive, catheter-based angiogram. The increased rotation speed of the gantry and the use of multiple detectors (64-slice CT now) enable imaging of the fast-moving coronary arteries. Cardiac CT can estimate the narrowing of the arterial lumen, identify both calcified and non-calcified plaque and characterize the artery wall. Many studies have stated the high sensitivity and specificity of CT for the detection of coronary stenosis. The sensitivity was 99% and the specificity was 95% of the cardiac CT. This proof of Cardiac CT can clearly distinguish high-risk patients from low and moderate-risk patients. This high predictive nature of Cardiac CT can strike out disruptive CAD and also the need for angiography. CT scan is also used to accurately assess the left ventricular function (regional wall motion, ejection fraction, infarct identification) than the gold standard, cardiac MR, and also contrast echocardiography. CT is also helpful in the assessment of patients with congenital heart disease. Currently, investigations are going on to evaluate the use of CT in the emergency room for the assessment of acute chest pain to rule out obstructive CAD, aortic dissection, and pulmonary embolus. CT is not advised as a screening test due to radiation exposure. However, there are a few limitations to cardiac CT. Cardiac CT has proved to be of immeasurable value and has numerous applications to its credit. It has shown its ability to detect calcified and noncalcified plaque, and luminous stenosis in coronary arteries. Cardiac CT can become the first test for Symptomatic, low-to-intermediate risk patients to rule out obstructive CAD thanks to its consistent negative predictive power of more than 98%. Cardiac CT is a great boon, which should be used in appropriate clinical settings.