Scans may explain differing heart disease risk for sexes

When it comes to differences between the sexes, scientists have gone right to the heart of the matter in new research.

Variations in the shape and texture of men’s and women’s hearts could explain why their risk of heart disease differs, experts suggested.

Using a new heart-specific image analysis “toolkit” called CMR radiomics on the organ’s left ventricle, scientists delved deeper to discover more subtle differences between the genders and how these change with age.

In men, the heart muscle was dominated by more coarse textures, while women’s hearts had finer grained textures, researchers at Queen Mary University of London found, in collaboration with Barcelona University and Southampton University.

Looking at the heart structure of 667 healthy people – 309 men and 358 women – from the UK Biobank Imaging study, they also found that men had a larger surface area of heart muscle, even after accounting for body size.

The organ’s shape and texture was also found to change as years go by.

While differences in heart shape between men and women decreased with age, texture differences remained across all age groups and dominated in older age, researchers said.

The British Heart Foundation, which funded the research, said if used in future on people with heart and circulatory diseases, such as those with diabetes, high blood pressure and coronary heart disease, it could reveal how the heart structure differs between cardiovascular health and disease.