- Researchers are recommending an upgrade in a widely used scoring system to ensure better heart disease diagnosis in women.
- The researchers suggest leveraging big data and incorporating machine learning to improve the Framingham Risk Score system.
- Experts say medical professionals as well as women themselves tend to ignore cardiovascular disease symptoms in females.
The scoring system used to predict a person’s risk of cardiovascular disease needs to get an upgrade to ensure it accounts for risk factors specifically affecting women, according to a study published today in the journal Frontiers in Physiology.
The Framingham Risk Score (FRS) analyzes
While the system does account for gender, researchers say it has never considered the more specific factors within the female body that significantly affect their risk of heart attack or stroke.
“Anatomically, female and male hearts are different,” the study authors wrote. “For example, female hearts are smaller and have thinner walls. Yet, the diagnostic criteria for certain heart diseases are the same for women and men, meaning that women’s hearts must increase disproportionally more than men’s before the same risk criteria are met.”
The researchers said the current design of the FRS means multiple cardiovascular conditions are overlooked and consequently under-diagnosed in women.
“When it comes to cardiovascular diseases in particular, the prevalence of these diseases is higher in men than women, but several studies have shown that women are less likely to be diagnosed during a routine exam, get diagnosed at an older age, and with more severe symptoms than men,” Skyler St. Pierre, a study author and a researcher at the Stanford University Living Matter Lab in California, told Medical News Today….
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