Men begin to develop a higher risk for cardiovascular diseases around age 35, earlier than women, according to a new long-term study conducted on 5,000 people.
All participants were healthy and without heart problems at the time they entered the study and were followed on average for 34 years, with regular clinical examinations and questionnaires. During the follow-up, 160 women and 227 men experienced cardiovascular events.
Cardiovascular diseases are the #1 cause of deaths worldwide, with 32% (19.8 million) of deaths worldwide in 2022 being due to them.
While up to age 30 men and women had a similar risk, this increased over the decades for both sexes, but more strongly for men, and thus men ended up developing cardiovascular disease earlier than women. Characteristically, 5% of men had developed cardiovascular diseases around age 50, while women reached this disease-rate percentage about seven years later, around age 57.
The difference is not explained by traditional risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure and cholesterol. Some scientists attribute the difference to the additional stress that men may experience, while others hypothesise that some female hormones (estrogens) have a protective effect against such diseases until menopause (when their levels drop).
Source: CNN, Journal of The American Heart Association
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