Our story - Research news - The woman’s heart
The woman’s heart
May 2nd, 2011
Heart disease is Australia’s number one killer. In fact, it kills four times as many women as breast cancer does, but many women are not aware of their risk.
Problems with blood supply to the heart muscle are signaled by chest pain. When women are investigated for chest pain, they are less likely than men to have narrowing of the large blood vessels of the heart. Yet, despite being less likely to have diagnosed coronary artery disease, women with chest pain are more likely to die from the condition.
Associate Professor Jock Campbell, Head of SVI’s Molecular Cardiology Unit, has recently published a paper that goes some way towards explaining why this is the case. In collaboration with the cardiac surgeons at St. Vincent's Hospital, and with the consent of patients, Jock has obtained small pieces of heart muscle from patients having heart operations.
When Jock compared the small blood vessels in heart muscle from men and women under the microscope he found, surprisingly, that the walls of the small blood vessels were thicker in women than in men.
Jock says, “We know from other studies that blood vessels with thicker walls are more likely to constrict and limit blood flow. The small blood vessels with thicker walls in the heart muscle of women may reduce the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the heart muscle. This may result in chest pain and heart attacks, even though the woman’s coronary arteries appear to be free of disease.”
Jock hopes that this greater understanding of how the small blood vessels in heart muscle affect disease vulnerability will allow us to reduce the rate of death from heart disease in both men and women.
These advances also show the importance of partnership between researchers and the community. In this case, this takes the form of the contribution made by the many patients who agreed to the surgeon taking a small piece of their heart muscle for Jock to study.