Even at very old ages, men die of heart disease at a higher rate than women. At age 85 and above, although more females than males succumbed to the disease in 2003, 5,621 males died per 100,000 population vs. 5,126 females. (Men’s higher death rate from heart disease and other diseases is often regarded not as a problem for men but as a problem for women, as in “a man shortage” or “female impoverishment.” Thus, policies are developed to address elderly women’s living standards, not to address men’s shorter lives.)
The American Heart Association designated February 1 as “National Wear Red Day,” a day when Americans nationwide are asked to wear red to show their support for women’s heart-disease awareness. AHA ignores its own charts. For fear of feminists? Or because it is now feminist itself, which is to say it is now sexist?
After reading this Male Matters commentary, do you agree we should show support only for women’s heart-disease awareness?
Updated November 19, 2016
Heart disease takes more female lives than male. The reason, women’s health advocates insist, is that the medical profession pays less attention to how the disease affects women.
“Until recently,” Melody Brumble of the Shreveport Times says, “women were ignored in heart disease prevention studies and clinical trials.”
In Elizabeth Cohen’s CNN report, “Heart disease often misdiagnosed in women,” Women’s Enews is quoted as saying, “Doctors are overlooking and undertreating heart disease in women….”
“Years ago,” actor/singer/activist Barbra Streisand says, “I learned that more women die from heart disease each year than men due to stunning gender inequality in the research and treatment of women with heart disease.”
But are neglect and undertreatment — which the advocates imply are deliberate, perhaps as if they believe some male doctors and researchers are cruel misogynists who want women to die? — of women’s heart disease really to blame for females’ higher number of fatalities?
Compare how many U.S. men and women at different ages, all races, per 100,000 population, fell to the disease in 2003:
Ages Females Males
25-34 5.7 10.5
35-44 18.6 42.8
45-54 50.2 136.2
55-64 141.9 331.7
65-74 417.5 785.3
75-84 1,331.1 2,030.3
85 + 5,126.7 5,621.5
___________
The leading causes of death for 2012 can be found here.
Compiled from National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 10, March 15, 2007 (pdf) (Rates begin on p. 20 of the pdf.) For 2010 data, pub. May 8, 2013, go here.
“Medical myths die hard, and one of the biggest is that heart disease is a problem mostly for men. That’s not even close to being true: according to the American Heart Association (AHA), more women than men die from heart disease in the U.S., and 1 in 3 women is living with it today.” —Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, calling a truth a myth, then creating his own myth, even though in 2003, he apparently agreed with this: “Virtually all stress-related diseases — from hypertension to heart disease — are more common in men.” (One of the 21 century’s greatest mysteries is that women’s advocates believe we need to raise the awareness only of women’s heart disease.) As of January 2008, Gupta was Pres. Obama’s pick for the new surgeon general. Amazing, isn’t it, how fast even good doctors can do a 180 once they become political. (By the way, spreading the health around to men is apparently not on the President’s agenda.)
Up to age 65, over twice as many men die of heart disease — which is even more striking given that from about age 35 females outnumber males. Only at age 65 do as many women begin to die of the disease. And though not shown in the above table, only at about age 75 (when the average man is close to death) do a greater number of women begin dying of heart disease — but still at a lower rate.
“At age 65, for every 100 American women, there are only 77 men. At age 85, the disparity is even greater, with women outnumbering men by 2.6 to 1. [For every 100 men, 260 women!] And the longevity gap persists even into very old age, long after hormones have passed their peak; among centenarians, there are four females for every male.” –Harvard.edu
Yet even at age 75 and older, as said and as the table above indicates, males die of heart disease at a higher rate. Above age 84, although in 1998 over twice as many females succumbed to the disease, 6,354 males died per 100,000 vs. 5,898 females. Obviously, if men as a group lived as long as women, more men than women would die of heart disease at all ages.
“Even as we are increasingly hearing that women die of heart disease as often as men, we are not hearing that when most women die of heart disease, [most] men have been long dead.” —Warren Farrell
Women’s advocates have often regarded men’s generally shorter life span as a problem not for men but for women, as in the “man shortage” and elderly women’s poverty.
Now, perversely, because of men’s earlier demise, the advocates are able to use statistics misleadingly to suggest that heart disease hits women harder and that women with the disease are undertreated. For example, according to the Office of Research on Women’s Health (there is no Office of Health
Research on Men’s Health for the sooner-dying, less-healthy sex; see Warren Farrell’s stunning 2018 book “The Boy Crisis” for detail on this government sexism): “About 44 percent of women who have heart attacks die within one year, whereas only about 27 percent of men die within one year.”
That’s because far more women than men (about six million more) live to the older ages when both sexes are most at risk of the disease, and when women are frailer, possibly have co-existing, old-age complications that preclude rigorous therapy, and are less likely to survive an attack. “When women have a heart attack,” says Pamela Douglas, MD, Duke University Medical Center, “they are sicker, older, and have more risk factors, which explains the mortality difference.”
“Because female sex is associated with a longer life expectancy than male sex,” the American Heart Association in November 2011 said, “women constitute a larger proportion of the elderly population in which the prevalence of CVD is greatest.”
If many women are less aware of heart disease than they need to be, perhaps that’s because almost every day for years women’s advocates and the media kept women focused on — and angry about — the breast-cancer “epidemic.” But which sex do you really think needs to be made more aware of heart disease (or, for that matter, any disease other than breast cancer), when you consider this: Women visit doctors nearly twice as often as men for preventive care, according to a 2001 study by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The very definition of preventive care is raising awareness of one’s health threats and risks. (See also the federal government’s Office On Women’s Health [NOTE: this link has been deleted; I suspect deliberately in Obama’s ordered purgings], which says, “…[W]omen are more likely to obtain preventive services, with almost one in five women’s visits for prevention purposes.”) A good indication that men need to be made more aware of their health comes from the government’s Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality. It is trying to get men more interested in their health. [NOTE: this link, too, has been deleted; I suspect for the same reason as above.] Why don’t the mainstream media report this to make men more aware? The answer: Because not enough people protest sexism against men.
Men need more heart healthcare than women. If men “receive exactly the same level of care, males are statistically at a 10% greater risk than females.”
The complaint that heart disease hits women harder due to neglect has been heeded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The institute responded in particular to the complaint that most clinical trials of heart disease treatment and prevention were all-male. (It makes sense to study the group most vulnerable to a disease; e.g., most osteoporosis studies are of women. Moreover, new drugs and procedures are often tested in men before women for the same reason they’re tested in animals before humans.) Thus, in 1998, the NHLBI made sure that 68 percent of its heart-disease study subjects were women. Moreover, the institute now offers eight sex-specific heart-disease publications for women. How many does it offer for the sex that dies at a much higher rate? Zero. Government sexism. No, cruel government sexism. Again, see “The Boy Crisis,” by Warren Farrell.
Previously, when the NHLBI studied mostly the more-at-risk group — men — the studies were called sexist because, women’s advocates claimed, the studies ignored how heart disease affects women differently. Studying the different ways heart disease may affect different groups is always worthwhile. But now that the NHLBI studies mostly the less-at-risk group — women — women’s advocates ignore both the sexism and the very different way heart disease affects men: it kills them at a much higher rate at every age.
Suppose men lived longer than women. Suppose they developed heart disease 10 years later than women, died of the disease at a lower rate at every age, and men’s health advocates nevertheless portrayed men as having a higher risk of the disease. Suppose they blamed the male’s “higher risk” on sexism and on the undertreatment of men with heart disease. Finally, suppose the NHLBI then increased awareness of men’s heart disease, began studying mostly men, issued publications only for men — all the while ignoring women’s greater risk. What would happen? A lot of women’s advocates would faint from disbelief — if not die of a heart attack! Most would surely scream, “Men are sexist lunatics!”
“Men have a greater risk of heart attack than women do, and they have attacks earlier in life. Even after menopause, when women’s death rate from heart disease increases, it’s not as great as men’s.” —American Heart Association (When will the AHA stop siding with GoRed and contradicting itself?)
“New York men are significantly more likely than women to die before the age of 65. The reasons are many, but two stand out. One is heart disease. In the 35-to-64 age bracket, both sexes have similar rates of cancer deaths. But men in that group are twice as likely as women to die from heart trouble.” –New York Times
“The consequences of atherosclerosis clearly affect the longevity differential between men and women. Roughly speaking if all atherosclerotic causes of death were immediately eliminated the gender mortality gap would be cut in half.” -Psychology Today, February 4, 2017
Women, like men, must be made aware of heart disease. But what should be remembered is this: Despite all the sensationalism about the “neglect” and the “undertreatment” of women with heart disease, the disease still poses a far bigger threat to men. If the sensationalism results in funds being diverted from research of men’s heart disease into women’s, the disease will surely kill even more men — more of our fathers, grandfathers, brothers, uncles, and sons. That would be a truly sad sexism.
______
Which sex needs to be made aware of heart disease and its health in general:
See the dramatic charts at Heart.org, which is almost full throttle into promoting awareness of women’s heart disease.
NOTES:
CNN”s Elizabeth Cohen, who wrote the above-cited report “Heart disease often misdiagnosed in women,” conveniently ignores the fact that the disease is very likely more often misdiagnosed in men. She ought to read this about the deceased CBS reporter Ed Bradley, a black man and a member of the group at the greatest risk of heart disease. WHO needs to be made more aware of heart disease?
Women’s health advocates also claim women with lung cancer are undertreated. For the truth, first see the gender statistics on lung cancer here, then reread the above commentary, inserting the lung cancer statistics and substituting “lung cancer” for “heart disease.”
See Marianne J. Legato’s 2009 book, Why Men Die First: “Men are more likely to experience the first ravages of coronary heart disease in their mid-30s, 15 or 20 years before women. And twice as many men die of the disease as do women.”
⦁ “At 45 years of age, lifetime risks [for sudden cardiac death] were 10.9% (95% CI, 9.4–12.5) for men and 2.8% (95% CI, 2.1–3.5) for women.”
⦁ “We present the first lifetime risk estimates for SCD. Greater aggregate risk factor burden, or blood pressure level alone, is associated with higher lifetime risks for SCD. This high risk of premature death attributed to SCD (approximately 1 in 9 men and 1 in 30 women) should serve as a motivator of public health efforts in preventing and responding to SCD.”
⦁ “We describe the first estimates of lifetime risks for SCD. Total remaining lifetime risk estimates for men were at least twice that of women for all index ages (45, 55, 65, and 75 years).”
⦁ “Stecker et al. recently estimated that, in the United States, the years of potential life lost to SCD were 2.0 million for men and 1.3 million for women, which is greater than for any individual cancer and most other leading causes of death.”
More evidence of institutions distorting gender heart disease:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10413733?dopt=Abstract
“After myocardial infarction, younger women, but not older women, have higher rates of death during hospitalization than men of the same age. The younger the age of the patients, the higher the risk of death among women relative to men. Younger women with myocardial infarction represent a high-risk group deserving of special study.” This pertains to men and women who are hospitalized AFTER having a heart attack. Could it be that many more men die of heart attacks than women before reaching the hospital and those who are hospitalized are stronger?
Here’s the proof that many more men than women die before reaching the hospital: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/98/21/2334.full
“However, among patients with coronary heart disease, the proportion of coronary deaths that are sudden [they generally don’t die in the hospital] decreases with age. Sudden cardiac death has a much higher incidence in men than women, reflecting sex differences in the incidence of coronary heart disease as well. Thus, ≈75% of sudden cardiac deaths occur in men, with an annual incidence 3 to 4 times higher than in women.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1767447/
“Male sex was associated with increased risk of SCD independently of age”
“Conclusions: Compared with non-SCD the risk of SCD is relatively highest in the younger age groups, but the absolute risk of SCD is much higher among the upper age groups than the younger. The risk of SCD was slightly lower in women but not enough to warrant a different treatment strategy.”
“Women Get CABG Less Often, But Gender Bias Isn’t Reason”
“Why men are more prone to heart attacks than women https://www.livestrong.com/article/3442991-why-men-are-more-prone-to-heart-attack-than-women/
https://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/Atherosclerosis/68205?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2017-09-29&eun=g244113d0r&pos=0
“Women with heart disease tend to receive fewer surgical coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedures than men, but gender bias in selecting patients for surgery is not to blame, new research suggests. Rather, when delayed coronary artery disease (CAD) is diagnosed in women, they are frequently older and sicker than men when presenting for treatment and, therefore, poorer candidates for aggressive surgical revascularization, said Fraser Rubens, MD, of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, who led a study published Thursday in Annals of Thoracic Surgery.”
My "Male Side" To Gender Issues. 
The Sexism of Go Red: Women’s advocates wrong about why more women die of heart disease than men
Even at very old ages, men die of heart disease at a higher rate than women. At age 85 and above, although more females than males succumbed to the disease in 2003, 5,621 males died per 100,000 population vs. 5,126 females. (Men’s higher death rate from heart disease and other diseases is often regarded not as a problem for men but as a problem for women, as in “a man shortage” or “female impoverishment.” Thus, policies are developed to address elderly women’s living standards, not to address men’s shorter lives.)
The American Heart Association designated February 1 as “National Wear Red Day,” a day when Americans nationwide are asked to wear red to show their support for women’s heart-disease awareness. AHA ignores its own charts. For fear of feminists? Or because it is now feminist itself, which is to say it is now sexist?
After reading this Male Matters commentary, do you agree we should show support only for women’s heart-disease awareness?
Updated November 19, 2016
Heart disease takes more female lives than male. The reason, women’s health advocates insist, is that the medical profession pays less attention to how the disease affects women.
“Until recently,” Melody Brumble of the Shreveport Times says, “women were ignored in heart disease prevention studies and clinical trials.”
In Elizabeth Cohen’s CNN report, “Heart disease often misdiagnosed in women,” Women’s Enews is quoted as saying, “Doctors are overlooking and undertreating heart disease in women….”
“Years ago,” actor/singer/activist Barbra Streisand says, “I learned that more women die from heart disease each year than men due to stunning gender inequality in the research and treatment of women with heart disease.”
But are neglect and undertreatment — which the advocates imply are deliberate, perhaps as if they believe some male doctors and researchers are cruel misogynists who want women to die? — of women’s heart disease really to blame for females’ higher number of fatalities?
Compare how many U.S. men and women at different ages, all races, per 100,000 population, fell to the disease in 2003:
Up to age 65, over twice as many men die of heart disease — which is even more striking given that from about age 35 females outnumber males. Only at age 65 do as many women begin to die of the disease. And though not shown in the above table, only at about age 75 (when the average man is close to death) do a greater number of women begin dying of heart disease — but still at a lower rate.
Yet even at age 75 and older, as said and as the table above indicates, males die of heart disease at a higher rate. Above age 84, although in 1998 over twice as many females succumbed to the disease, 6,354 males died per 100,000 vs. 5,898 females. Obviously, if men as a group lived as long as women, more men than women would die of heart disease at all ages.
Women’s advocates have often regarded men’s generally shorter life span as a problem not for men but for women, as in the “man shortage” and elderly women’s poverty.
Now, perversely, because of men’s earlier demise, the advocates are able to use statistics misleadingly to suggest that heart disease hits women harder and that women with the disease are undertreated. For example, according to the Office of Research on Women’s Health (there is no Office of Health
Research on Men’s Health for the sooner-dying, less-healthy sex; see Warren Farrell’s stunning 2018 book “The Boy Crisis” for detail on this government sexism): “About 44 percent of women who have heart attacks die within one year, whereas only about 27 percent of men die within one year.”
That’s because far more women than men (about six million more) live to the older ages when both sexes are most at risk of the disease, and when women are frailer, possibly have co-existing, old-age complications that preclude rigorous therapy, and are less likely to survive an attack. “When women have a heart attack,” says Pamela Douglas, MD, Duke University Medical Center, “they are sicker, older, and have more risk factors, which explains the mortality difference.”
“Because female sex is associated with a longer life expectancy than male sex,” the American Heart Association in November 2011 said, “women constitute a larger proportion of the elderly population in which the prevalence of CVD is greatest.”
The complaint that heart disease hits women harder due to neglect has been heeded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). The institute responded in particular to the complaint that most clinical trials of heart disease treatment and prevention were all-male. (It makes sense to study the group most vulnerable to a disease; e.g., most osteoporosis studies are of women. Moreover, new drugs and procedures are often tested in men before women for the same reason they’re tested in animals before humans.) Thus, in 1998, the NHLBI made sure that 68 percent of its heart-disease study subjects were women. Moreover, the institute now offers eight sex-specific heart-disease publications for women. How many does it offer for the sex that dies at a much higher rate? Zero. Government sexism. No, cruel government sexism. Again, see “The Boy Crisis,” by Warren Farrell.
Previously, when the NHLBI studied mostly the more-at-risk group — men — the studies were called sexist because, women’s advocates claimed, the studies ignored how heart disease affects women differently. Studying the different ways heart disease may affect different groups is always worthwhile. But now that the NHLBI studies mostly the less-at-risk group — women — women’s advocates ignore both the sexism and the very different way heart disease affects men: it kills them at a much higher rate at every age.
Suppose men lived longer than women. Suppose they developed heart disease 10 years later than women, died of the disease at a lower rate at every age, and men’s health advocates nevertheless portrayed men as having a higher risk of the disease. Suppose they blamed the male’s “higher risk” on sexism and on the undertreatment of men with heart disease. Finally, suppose the NHLBI then increased awareness of men’s heart disease, began studying mostly men, issued publications only for men — all the while ignoring women’s greater risk. What would happen? A lot of women’s advocates would faint from disbelief — if not die of a heart attack! Most would surely scream, “Men are sexist lunatics!”
A June 19, 2016, study at the Journal of the American Heart Association, “Lifetime Risk for Sudden Cardiac Death in the Community“:
⦁ “At 45 years of age, lifetime risks [for sudden cardiac death] were 10.9% (95% CI, 9.4–12.5) for men and 2.8% (95% CI, 2.1–3.5) for women.”
⦁ “We present the first lifetime risk estimates for SCD. Greater aggregate risk factor burden, or blood pressure level alone, is associated with higher lifetime risks for SCD. This high risk of premature death attributed to SCD (approximately 1 in 9 men and 1 in 30 women) should serve as a motivator of public health efforts in preventing and responding to SCD.”
⦁ “We describe the first estimates of lifetime risks for SCD. Total remaining lifetime risk estimates for men were at least twice that of women for all index ages (45, 55, 65, and 75 years).”
⦁ “Stecker et al. recently estimated that, in the United States, the years of potential life lost to SCD were 2.0 million for men and 1.3 million for women, which is greater than for any individual cancer and most other leading causes of death.”
More evidence of institutions distorting gender heart disease:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10413733?dopt=Abstract
“After myocardial infarction, younger women, but not older women, have higher rates of death during hospitalization than men of the same age. The younger the age of the patients, the higher the risk of death among women relative to men. Younger women with myocardial infarction represent a high-risk group deserving of special study.” This pertains to men and women who are hospitalized AFTER having a heart attack. Could it be that many more men die of heart attacks than women before reaching the hospital and those who are hospitalized are stronger?
Here’s the proof that many more men than women die before reaching the hospital: http://circ.ahajournals.org/content/98/21/2334.full
“However, among patients with coronary heart disease, the proportion of coronary deaths that are sudden [they generally don’t die in the hospital] decreases with age. Sudden cardiac death has a much higher incidence in men than women, reflecting sex differences in the incidence of coronary heart disease as well. Thus, ≈75% of sudden cardiac deaths occur in men, with an annual incidence 3 to 4 times higher than in women.”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1767447/
“Male sex was associated with increased risk of SCD independently of age”
“Conclusions: Compared with non-SCD the risk of SCD is relatively highest in the younger age groups, but the absolute risk of SCD is much higher among the upper age groups than the younger. The risk of SCD was slightly lower in women but not enough to warrant a different treatment strategy.”
“Women Get CABG Less Often, But Gender Bias Isn’t Reason”
“Why men are more prone to heart attacks than women https://www.livestrong.com/article/3442991-why-men-are-more-prone-to-heart-attack-than-women/
https://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/Atherosclerosis/68205?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2017-09-29&eun=g244113d0r&pos=0
“Women with heart disease tend to receive fewer surgical coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) procedures than men, but gender bias in selecting patients for surgery is not to blame, new research suggests. Rather, when delayed coronary artery disease (CAD) is diagnosed in women, they are frequently older and sicker than men when presenting for treatment and, therefore, poorer candidates for aggressive surgical revascularization, said Fraser Rubens, MD, of the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, who led a study published Thursday in Annals of Thoracic Surgery.”
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