The largest, most comprehensive study of young women with heart attacks - VIRGO (Variation in Recovery: Role of Gender on Outcomes in Young AMI patients) - was recently launched at Yale School of Medicine with a $9.7 million National Institutes of Health grant.
“This is the first study to focus on this high risk—and highly unstudied—group.” said Yale School of Public Health Associate Professor Judith Lichtman, co-principal investigator of the study. “There have been no large, prospective studies of this population, even though the death toll is comparable to that from breast cancer.”
She said the research team is exploring what accounts for premature heart disease in women and why they experience worse outcomes than men of similar age with heart disease.
The four-year grant will support the study of 2,000 women age 55 and younger with 1,000 men for comparison. The multi-site study bridges disciplines from basic biology and clinical sciences to psychology and health services research.
Although women under age 55 with heart attacks represent a small proportion of all patients with heart disease, they account for about 40,000 hospitalizations each year. About 8,000 women under the age of 55 die of heart disease annually, ranking it among the major causes of death in this group. While most women in this age group are protected from heart disease, notes Lichtman, prior research indicates that young women have a much greater risk of dying after a heart attack than men of the same age.