Stress, Women and Acute Myocardial Infarction: What is known?

For decades, women were excluded from health research. This fact has been criticized by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), which sought to encourage the inclusion of women in clinical research trials, with little progress in the 1980s. Some of the most well-known examples occurred in cardiovascular research. The Harvard Physicians Health Study, which analyzed the relationship between moderate use of aspirin and heart disease, did not include women in the sample studied. In that occasion, the result could not be conclusive for its application to women. The Multiple Risk Factor Intervention Trials (MR. FIT) was another major research on heart disease that did not include female individuals. This national study examined how cholesterol levels, blood pressure and smoking affected the development of heart disease.

The omission of women from these and other studies at the time deserves to be highlighted in view of the cardiovascular mortality rates among women.

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