heart disease

Are you a single working mom? Take care as your heart health is more at risk

Single working moms, you may want to take extra care of yourselves as according to a recent study, your heart health is most at risk.

single-mom-and-daughterSingle working moms, you may want to take extra care of yourselves as according to a recent study, your heart health is most at risk. Researchers from Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, examined data on health, work and marital status for almost 11,000 women in Europe and 6,000 women in the US who were born between 1935 and 1956.

The odds of being a single working mother were twice as high in the US than Europe, they found. In the US, 11 per cent of women had been in that position at some point in their lives, compared to 5 per cent of women in Europe.

Compared with married mothers who worked, single mothers with jobs were 40 per cent more likely to have heart disease and 74 per cent more likely to have a stroke. They were also 77 per cent more likely to smoke, the study found.

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Why Your Heart Disease Risk May Not Be as High as You Think

@aliceparkny | 

Doctors may be overestimating risk for heart problems, which means some people may be prescribed drugs they don’t need

Heart disease is the leading killer of Americans, so predicting who is at highest risk of heart attack or stroke is a top priority. After decades of relying on a checklist of risk factors identified in the 1950s, which included factors like high cholesterol, high blood pressure, excessive weight gain and family history of heart trouble, heart experts decided to update the formula for calculating risk in 2013.

The new formula focused less on specific cholesterol targets and instead created an algorithm of the most significant risk factors, each weighted for how much they might contribute to heart issues. The problem, as many doctors quickly pointed out, was that the new formula seemed to loosen the criteria for putting people on medications, especially ones that lower cholesterol. Simply being older, for example, could push a person into higher risk territory that would warrant a statin prescription, even if this person ate a healthy diet, got plenty of exercise and wasn’t overweight or hypertensive. So this raised serious questions about whether everyone who qualified for treatment under the new guidelines actually needed it.

In a new report published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, researchers found that the new recommendations, created by the American Heart Association (AHA) and the American College of Cardiology (ACC), overestimates the risk of heart trouble up to five to six times. That means that five to six times as many people may be prescribed drugs like cholesterol-lowering statins who won’t necessarily benefit from them.

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