Preventing Cardiovascular Disease in Women: Guidelines

The 2007 American Heart Association Guidelines for Preventing Cardiovascular Disease in Women were published in a special women's health issue of Circulation: Journal of The American Heart Association, have been published and released.

The new guidelines replace the guidelines published in 2004. The newer guidelines put more emphasis on lifetime, rather than short term care. They also include new directions fro using aspirin, hormone therapy and vitamin and mineral supplements in heart disease and stroke prevention in women.

The new recommendations are based upon newer research and more definitive clinical trials. "The new data suggests that health care providers should consider aspirin in women to prevent stroke," said Lori Mosca, M.D., Ph.D., Director of Preventive Cardiology at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and chair of the American Heart Associating expert panel that wrote the guidelines, "In addition, providers should not use menopausal therapies such as hormone replacement therapy (HRT) or selective estrogen receptor modulators (SERMs) such as raloxifene or tomoxifene to prevent heart disease because they have been shown to be ineffective in protecting the heart and may increase the risk of stroke."

"The new guidelines reinforce that unregulated dietary supplements are not a method proven to prevent heart disease. For example, recent studies have shown that folic acid is ineffective to protect the heart despite widespread use by patients and physicians hoping for a heart benefit," Mosca says "These recent finding emphasize the importance of using well conducted clinical trial data to develop national recommendations to help patients and their doctors us best practices to prevent heart disease - practices based on data rather than myth or wishful thinking."