Study: Stress Test Can Gauge Women’s Heart Risk

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Doctors hesitate to give women stress tests to diagnose heart disease because the results can be misleading, but a study said on Tuesday that a woman’s stamina on the treadmill exam can help gauge her risk.

CHICAGO (Reuters) – Doctors hesitate to give women stress tests to diagnose heart disease because the results can be misleading, but a study said on Tuesday that a woman’s stamina on the treadmill exam can help gauge her risk.Stress tests detect abnormal heartbeats in some women that scientists believe are caused by hormonal differences between women and men, and are not necessarily a sign of heart disease.But focusing on a woman’s fitness during the treadmill test — how long she can exercise as her heart beats faster and the time it takes her heartbeat to return to normal after she stops — does predict her risk of eventually dying from heart disease, said study author Samia Mora of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.In a 20-year followup study of nearly 3,000 women who took treadmill tests in the 1970s, the women who performed below average were 3.5 times more likely to die of heart disease compared to those who performed better than average.Unreliable stress test results sometimes require women to undergo expensive followup tests to see if their heart abnormalities were a sign of heart problems. Half of women with perceived abnormalities on the stress test turn out not to have heart disease.In the report published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Mora concluded that regular exercise was more important than losing weight, lowering blood pressure or reducing cholesterol levels in lessening a woman’s risk of heart attack or stroke.Heart disease kills one out of two U.S. women and two-thirds die without having previously identifiable symptoms, the study said.”The stress test has been around for 30 years, but for a long time it was thought to be not an effective test of women’s heart risk,” said cardiologist Nieca Goldberg of Lenox Hill Hospital in New York.”Why this is so important is it addresses the question about the best way to assess heart risk in women,” Goldberg, who was not involved in the study, said in a telephone interview.Another journal, Circulation, published a study earlier this month that found exercise capacity was more accurate at predicting heart disease in women than in men.(Source: Reuters, Tue September 23, 2003 03:58 PM ET, By Andrew Stern)