Childless women face 70% higher heart failure risk
WOMEN who never have children are at far greater risk of suffering from heart failure, a major study suggests. Experts found that women who remained childless were 70 per cent more likely to suffer from heart failure in old age, compared to women who had given birth to one child.
Women who start the menopause early are also more likely to fall victim, researchers found. This suggests sex hormones linked to pregnancy and menstruation play a major role in protecting the heart.
Heart failure, which occurs when the organ becomes too weak to pump blood efficiently round the body, affects around 900,000 people in the UK. As well as having an overall increased risk, childless women were also found to be nearly three times as likely to be at risk of heart failure from what is known as ‘preserved ejection fraction’. This is where the left side of the heart does not relax as well as it should.
Scientists suspect the raised threat is because during pregnancy there is a rapid increase in levels of oestrogen, a sex hormone that offers protection against heart disease.
Women who start the menopause early are also thought to be at risk because their oestrogen production halts.
Previously researchers believed childless women were in greater danger because they may have been infertile. But the team behind the new research found no link between heart failure and infertility rates, with women who chose not to start a family at equal risk to those who could not have children.
The researchers from the University of California, San Francisco analysed data on 28,519 post-menopausal women who were tracked for 13 years.
Some 5.2 per cent of the women were admitted to hospital with heart failure across the group. But those who had never given birth were 70 per cent more likely to have experienced heart failure. And they were up to three times more likely to have fallen victim to heart failure with preserved ejection fraction, taking their risk up to roughly 14 per cent.
The women, who had an average age of 62 at the start of the study, were also 1 per cent more likely to suffer heart failure for each extra year in advance their menopause arrived, according to the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
In the UK, the average age to reach the menopause is 51. But around one in 100 women experience it before the age of 40.
Study leader Dr Nisha Parikh said: ‘Our finding that a shorter total reproductive duration was associated with a modestly increased risk of heart failure might be due to the increased coronary heart disease risk that accompanies early menopause.’
Commenting on the research, Dr Nandita Scott, a cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital, said: ‘These findings raise interesting questions about the cardiometabolic effects of sex hormone exposure over a woman’s lifetime.’
Professor Metin Avkiran, of the British Heart Foundation, said studies had already shown early menopause may increase the risk of cardiovascular disease, adding: ‘Now, this study suggests early-onset menopause may also be associated with an increased risk of developing heart failure.’
‘Effects of sex hormone’