Hard-hearted men face more risk of disease, study suggests

MEN have a greater risk of heart disease because their hearts are made up of coarser tissue than those of women, a new study suggests.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London used a new imaging technique called CMR Radiomics to examine the heart structure of 667 healthy people, 309 men and 358 women, from the UK Biobank Imaging study.

As well as finding that women’s hearts have finer grained textures, they also established that men’s hearts tend to have a larger surface area, even after accounting for body size.

The organ’s shape and texture was also found to change as years go by. But while differences in heart shape between men and women decreased with age, the texture differences remained across all age groups and dominated in older age.

The findings, presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress, unearthed “buried treasure”, explained Dr Sonya Babu-narayan, the British Heart Foundation associate medical director.

“CMR scans give us a wealth of information about the heart, meaning that we can understand it to greater depths than ever before,” she said.

She added: “Next we need to find out if this technology can prove useful to assess cardiovascular risk in both women and men.”

BHF figures for 2017 show there were 85,397 male deaths recorded from heart and circulatory diseases, and 83,075 female deaths.

The universities of Southampton and Barcelona also contributed to the research.