• Posted March 25, 2025

Women More Vulnerable To Heart Risk Factors

Lifestyle factors like diet, exercise, smoking and blood pressure have a greater impact on the heart health of women than men, a new study says.

Women with poor health have nearly five times the risk of heart disease compared to women with ideal health, according to findings scheduled for presentation Saturday at a meeting of the American College of Cardiology in Chicago.

By comparison, men in poor health only have 2.5 times the risk of heart disease compared to men in ideal health.

“For the same level of health, our study shows that the increase in risk [related to each factor] is higher in women than in men — it’s not one-size-fits-all,” lead researcher Dr. Maneesh Sud, an interventional cardiologist at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Center in Toronto, said in a news release.

The new study is the first to show that such lifestyle risks are more strongly linked to women’s heart health, researchers said.

“This is novel and something that hasn’t been seen in other studies,” Sud said.

The study focused on eight factors associated with heart disease: diet, sleep, exercise, smoking, body mass index, blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure. (Body mass index is a estimate of body fat based on height and weight.)

Researchers looked at these factors in more than 175,000 Canadian adults who enrolled in the Ontario Health Study between 2009 and 2017. None had heart disease at the start of the study.

People were classified as having ideal or poor health in terms of each of the eight risk factors, and then the scores were combined to calculate an overall risk factor profile, researchers said.

People with fewer than five positive factors or more than three negative factors were judged to be in poor health, while ideal health involved good readings across all eight factors, researchers said.

Overall, women were more likely to have fewer negative risk factors and more positive ones compared to men.

But women with more negative risk factors face a more pronounced increase in their risk of a heart attack, stroke or other heart-related health problem compared to men with a similar risk factor profile, results show.

“We found that women tend to have better health than men, but the impact on outcomes is different,” Sud said. “The combination of these factors has a bigger impact in women than it does in men.”

About 9% of women and 5% of men scored as having ideal health, while 22% of women and 31% of men had poor health, researchers said.

Women were more likely than men to have ideal diet, blood sugar, cholesterol and blood pressure, but were slightly less likely to have ideal levels of exercise, results show.

Risk factors also had a greater impact on women with intermediate health, which researchers judged as having five to seven positive factors.

Women in intermediate health had 2.3 times the heart risk as those with ideal health, compared with a 1.6 greater risk among men with intermediate health.

Further study is needed to understand why these health factors might be affecting heart outcomes differently in men and women, researchers said.

Findings presented at medical meetings should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

More information

The American College of Cardiology has more on women and heart disease.

SOURCE: American College of Cardiology, news release, March 18, 2025