Gender-Related Cardiovascular Risk in Healthy Middle-Aged Adults

Abstract Men tend to develop cardiovascular disease (CVD) earlier in life than women. Whether this difference is attributable only to gender is a matter of debate. The purpose of this study was to evaluate gender differences in cardiovascular risk in a large cohort of asymptomatic men and women, and explore gender-related risk in pre-specified risk factor subgroups. We investigated 14,966 asymptomatic men and women free of diabetes, hypertension or ischemic heart disease who were annually screened. The primary end point of the current study was the occurrence of ischemic or cerebrovascular disease as composite endpoint. Multivariate Cox proportional hazards regression modeling was used to assess the gender difference regarding CVD and to examine the association between CVD risk factors and gender. Mean age of the study population was 47±10 and 30% were women. Kaplan-Meier survival analysis showed that at 6.2±3.9 years’ follow-up, the rate of CVD events was 6.1% among men as compared with 1.8% among women (log-rank P