Author : Dr. PD GUPTA
Former Director Grade Scientist, Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology, Hyderabad, India
www.daylifenews.in
A new study finds that women who had experienced infertility had a 16 percent increased risk of heart failure compared with women who did not have an infertility history.
This study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
“We are beginning to recognize that a woman’s reproductive history tells a lot about her future risk of heart disease,” says author Emily Lau, a cardiologist and director of the Menopause, Hormones & Cardiovascular Clinic at MGH,USA. “Whether a woman has difficulty becoming pregnant, what happens during her pregnancies, when she transitions through menopause all influence her risk of heart disease later in life.”
Infertility affects about 1 in 5 U.S. women and includes a spectrum of conception difficulties, but its link with heart failure has not been well-studied until recently. Partnering with the Women’s Health Initiative, which was designed in the early 1990s and queried a woman’s reproductive history, Lau and colleagues studied postmenopausal women from the WHI and examined whether infertility was associated with development of heart failure.
There are two types of heart failure: heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) and heart failure with reduced ejection fraction (HFrEF). Ejection fraction is a measurement related to the volume percentage of blood that is pumped from the left ventricle of the heart during each beat. An ejection fraction less than 50 percent is commonly viewed as abnormal or reduced.
The team found an association between infertility and overall heart failure, specifically with HFpEF, a form of heart failure that is far more common in women regardless of fertility history. Among the 38,528 postmenopausal women studied, 14 percent of the participants reported a history of infertility. Over a 15-year follow up period, the researchers noted that infertility was associated with 16 percent future risk of overall heart failure. When they examined heart failure subtypes, they found that infertility was associated with a 27 percent increased future risk of HFpEF.
Over the past decade, HFpEF (where the heart muscle does not relax well) as opposed to HFrEF (where the left ventricle does not pump well), has become the dominant form of heart failure in both men and women. But it remains more common in women.
“It’s a challenging condition because we still do not completely understand how HFpEF develops and we do not have very good therapies to treat HFpEF,” says Lau.
“I think our findings are particularly noteworthy because heart failure with preserved ejection fraction is more prevalent in women,” says Lau. “We don’t understand why we see HFpEF more in women. Looking back in a woman’s early. (The author has his own study and views)