Cardio-vascular disease in the United States Essay

Cardio-vascular disease in the United States - Essay Example In order to target this leading national health problem, The American Heart Association (AHA) updated CVD prevention guidelines for women in early 2007, encouraging the pursuit of a healthy lifestyle early on. In previous decades, CVD was thought to affect greater proportions of American men than women. This was an incorrect conclusion, but reinforced by the fact that clinical trials predominantly used male subjects instead of females, and that women are less likely to show cardiovascular symptoms as early as males. In fact, on average, women begin to show symptoms 10 years later in life then do men. It is evident in the research literature as well as in formal published insurance analyses (Murasko 1746) that women continue to receive less aggressive treatment for CVD events than is provided to men and this inadequate treatment worsens with the patient’s increasing age (Murasko 1755-6, Sarafidis 224; Alter et al. 1916). At the same time, women survive CVD events such as myocar dial infarction (MI) more frequently than do men (ibid.), adding to the US population segment comprised of the elderly with cardiac history, inadequate treatment, and higher long-term medical expenses, because their risk of additional CVD events is 1.5 – 15% higher than average: â€Å"After adjusting for baseline differences, the relative rates of angiography and follow-up specialist care for women relative to men, respectively, fell 17.5% (95% confidence interval [CI], 13.6 to 21.3, p â€Å"†¦ for individuals with previously diagnosed heart disease or stroke, a lack of coverage is more strongly associated with lower