A new study confirms what healthcare professionals have realized for some time: when it comes to cardiovascular medicine, women and men may respond very differently to treatment. The study, led by the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre (RI MUHC), shows that warfarin, a common therapy used to prevent stroke in people with atrial fibrillation (AF) may not be as effective in women, 75 years or older, as in men.
“Elderly women with AF may need to be targeted for more effective stroke prevention therapy,” says Dr. Louise Pilote, corresponding author of the study, researcher in epidemiology at the RI MUHC and Professor at McGill University’s Department of Medicine ”Physicians and patients should be aware that stroke risk is higher in women.”
Atrial fibrillation is the most common cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heart rhythm). People with AF have a risk of stroke that is 5 times greater than those in the general population
“In our study, women had a 14 % higher risk of stroke,” says Dr. Meytal Avgil Tsadok, first author of the study and Post-Doctoral Fellow funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in the Division of Clinical Epidemiology at the MUHC. “The level of anticoagulation may not be as high in women compared to men. Other factors might also be involved.”
“Physicians should put more emphasis on female sex as a risk factor in deciding to start anti coagulation treatment for stroke,” says Dr. Pilote who is also director of the Division of General Internal Medicine at McGill and the MUHC. “Because study results in men do not always apply to women, we need women to participate in our studies in order to develop new strategies to effectively prevent stroke equally in both sexes.”
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