Abstract
Background
Cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the main cause of death and disability in the western world. Women are known to be older at the time of first CVD event, but the main types of CVD events and their relative importance and differences compared with men are not well known. Our aim was to evaluate gender differences in the clinical presentation of incident major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE).
Design
A population-based study with prospective follow-up.
Methods
We used data from the population-based National FINRISK Surveys from years 1992, 1997, 2002 and 2007. People with prevalent cardiovascular disease were excluded. In total, 27,897 participants (53, 2% women) aged 25–74 years were included in the analyses.
Results
During the 292,316 person-years of follow-up, 2573 MACE were identified. MACE were more frequent in men than women (1318; 95% CI 1252–1388 in men vs. 736; 686–789 in women). Men had four times more fatal coronary heart disease (CHD) events (149; 126–174 vs. 39; 28–53) and three times more non-fatal CHD events (512; 471–555 vs. 164; 141–189) than women. Stroke incidence was higher in men than women (268; 238–301 vs. 169; 145–195). Heart failure (HF) incidence did not differ between genders. The relative proportions of MACE categories differed substantially between genders: HF was the most common type among women (50% vs. 30% in men), whereas the most common type among men was CHD (50% vs. 28% in women).
Conclusions
Incident MACE were more common in men than women. HF was the dominant type of MACE in women, whereas CHD dominated in men.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
Supplementary Material
Please find the following supplemental material available below.
For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.
For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.
