Circulation February 18, 2020 Issue Circulation on the Run

Dr Biykem Bozkurt: I am Biykem Bozkurt, Professor of Medicine from Baylor College of Medicine, Senior Associate Editor for Circulation and today, I'm joined with Sana Al-Khatib, Professor of Medicine from Duke University, Senior Associate Editor of Circulation, for the podcast for the fourth annual Go Red for Women issue for Circulation. As all our listeners are aware, cardiovascular disease is a leading cause of death among women, but we have significant gaps in our awareness and treatments, and with a recognition of these disparities for cardiovascular care in women, AHA has launched a Go Red for Women campaign back in 2004. We have made great strides, and despite the improvement in awareness, significant gaps persist and adverse trends are emerging for cardiovascular disease in women.
With such recognition, in 2017, Circulation launched the annual Go Red for Women issue, dedicated to cover transformative science, exciting new treatment strategies, recent epidemiological trends, and with an intent to close the gaps and eliminate the disparities for cardiovascular care in women. This is the fourth Go Red for Women issue and we have an exciting portfolio that we'd like to share with our readers and listeners. In this issue, we have quite a few important papers. The first two that we would like to start with are going over the epidemiologic trends. Sana, do you want to walk us through the two papers that we have on myocardial infarction and sudden cardiac death?
Dr Sana Al-Khatib: I would love to start with the paper on sudden cardiac death, which is very fitting. That's what I focus most of my work on. This particular paper actually looked at sudden cardiac death as the first manifestation of heart disease in women, and it was focused on the Oregon sudden unexpected death study, the timeframe for which was between 2004 and 2016 and what they really wanted to do is to assess sex specific trends in sudden cardiac death incidence. And so they focused on out of hospital, sudden cardiac death cases among adults during that time period.
And they divided that 12-year period from February 2004 to January 2016 into three four-year intervals, 2004 to 2007, 2008 to 2011 and 2012 to 2015. And they really looked at these trends among women and men and they found that there were 2,938 sudden cardiac deaths, 37% of who were women. And they found an interesting U-shaped pattern of risk of sudden cardiac death with Anader in 2011. An increase in the years that followed 2011 so regarding that rebound, the rates really increased in 2013 and 2015. And when they specifically looked at women, they found that the rates of sudden cardiac death declined by 30% between the first and second four year time period and increased by 27% between the second and third period.
Interestingly, the subsets with sudden cardiac death as the first manifestation of heart disease, accounted for 58% of the total rebound in sudden cardiac death incidence from period two to three but there was no change in the incidence over time for sudden cardiac death occurring among people with preexisting heart disease. For men actually sudden cardiac death also declined from the first to the second period, but not as much as in women and also increased between the second and third periods. Again, not as much as we saw in women. Subsets of sudden cardiac death occurring in the setting of identifiable heart disease was responsible for 55% of the rebound in overall sudden cardiac deaths incidence. Certainly some significant differences between men and women. Very exciting findings.
Then if we actually turn our attention to the second study looking at sex specific trends in acute myocardial infarction, this particular analysis, Biykem, was done within an integrated healthcare network between 2000 and 2014 and they picked the Kaiser Permanente Southern California network. They were able to identify 45,000 plus acute MI hospitalizations between 2000 and 2014 and they found that ag