TUESDAY, July 8 (HealthDay News) -- Although heart attacks are rare among young women, becoming pregnant does double or triple a woman's risk, a new study finds.

"This is a unique phenomenon in the sense that these are young women who are not supposed to have [heart attacks]," said lead researcher Dr. Uri Elkayam, a professor of medicine at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

About 250 pregnant women in the United States each year suffer a heart attack, Elkayam said. However, mortality can be high in these cases, mainly because a diagnosis of heart problems is often missed or delayed. "These women are victims of a lack of awareness," Elkayam said.

Physicians should not dismiss symptoms of chest pain and young women as not being from a heart attack, he said. "If somebody had symptoms of what could be a heart attack, the physician needs to consider [it]."

One reason for the increase in the number of pregnant women having heart attacks is that women in the United States are becoming pregnant at much later ages, Elkayam said. "So, it is anticipated that the number of pregnant women who have heart attacks will increase," he said.

The report was published in the July 15 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.

In the study, Elkayam's team reviewed the cases of 103 women who had heart attacks during their pregnancy.

Women who had a heart attack in the 24 hours before or after delivery were twice as likely to die from heart attack compared with women who had a heart attack before labor or in the first day to three months after delivery, the team found.

Elkayam's group also found that older pregnant women were at greater risk for having a heart attack. In fact, 72 percent of the women who had heart attacks were older than 30, and one in four were older than 35.

One of the most common causes of heart attacks among pregnant women was coronary dissection, where the wall of the coronary arteries is weakened and separates. "This is a rare type of heart attack," Elkayam said.

Most women in this group did not have atherosclerosis or blocked arteries, the usual causes of heart attack, he noted.

Many women studied had standard risk factors for heart attack, Elkayam said. Among these women, 45 percent smoked, 24 percent had high cholesterol, 22 percent had a family history of heart attack, 15 percent had high blood pressure, and 11 percent had diabetes.

However, "early diagnosis and appropriate treatment can result in an improvement in outcome," Elkayam said. "Ten years ago, the mortality rate was 20 percent. Now, it's between 5 and 10 percent. So, we are making progress."

Dr. Jeffrey S. Berger, from the department of cardiovascular medicine at Duke University Medical Center, in Durham, N.C., said that "fortunately, this is not a very common experience."

However, internists and cardiologists should be aware of the increased risk of heart attack during pregnancy, he said. "Women who have risk factors for heart disease should take this into consideration and speak with their physicians about it," Berger added.

More information

For more on women and heart disease, visit the American Heart Association  .

MONDAY, July 7 (HealthDay News) -- A compound found in red grapes and red wine suppresses abnormal cell formation that leads to most types of breast cancer, according to U.S. researchers.

The compound, resveratrol, is sold in extract form as a dietary supplement.

Breast cancer forms through a multi-stage process that differs depending on the type of disease, a person's genes, and other factors. However, it's known that increased estrogen fuels many types of breast cancer.

"Resveratrol has the ability to prevent the first step that occurs when estrogen starts the process that leads to cancer by blocking the formation of the estrogen DNA adducts. We believe that this could stop the whole progression that leads to breast cancer down the road," study author Eleanor G. Rogan, a professor in the Eppley Institute for Research in Cancer and Allied Diseases at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, said in a prepared statement.

In laboratory testing, Rogan and her team found that as little as 10 umol/L of resveratrol could suppress DNA adducts associated with breast cancer. A glass of red wine contains between 9 and 28 umol/L of resveratrol.

Rogan and colleagues also found that reseveratrol suppressed expression of CYP1B1 and the formation of 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin, two known risk factors for breast cancer.

Resveratrol induces an enzyme called quinone reductase, which reduces the estrogen metabolite back to inactive form and reduces breast cancer risk, Rogan explained.

The findings, which are in the July issue of Cancer Prevention Research, will have to be confirmed in human trials, she noted.

More information

The U.S. National Cancer Institute has more about breast cancer prevention.

TUESDAY, July 1 (HealthDay News) -- Contradicting some earlier reports, a new study finds that women who have heart attacks benefit as much as men from the artery-opening procedure called catheterization.

But that benefit is seen only in women whose heart damage is severe enough to be classified as a heart attack, said study author Dr. Michelle O'Donoghue, a member of the TIMI Research Group at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston. Those who have suffered a "near heart attack" called unstable angina should be given more conservative treatment.

"There are blood tests we routinely give to see whether someone has had a heart attack, permanent damage to the heart muscle," O'Donoghue said. "When the tests are elevated, they indicate a higher risk. There is greater muscle tissue damage and so greater incentive to go to catheterization."

In that procedure, a thin wire with a balloon at its end, the catheter, is threaded to the site of a clot blocking a heart artery. The balloon is then inflated to open the artery and restore blood flow.

Some studies had found greater risk than benefit for women with suspected heart attacks. But this analysis of eight randomized trials including more than 10,000 patients, 30 percent of them women, found an overall benefit for women for whom a heart attack was diagnosed. The report was published in the July 2 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.

Women who had catheterization had a 19 percent lower risk of death, heart attack or rehospitalization than those who had drug treatment, the study found. For men, the risk was 27 percent lower with catheter treatment than with conservative therapy.

But the gains for women were concentrated among those whose blood tests did not show severe heart damage. For those women, the preferred strategy is "first maximize medical therapy, then catheterize only if there is ongoing chest pain or positive results on a stress test," O'Donoghue said.

It's not entirely clear why women should differ from men in this particular cardiac problem, she said. One possibility is that women are more likely to have other conditions that complicate the situation, such as diabetes, O'Donoghue said. "Or they may have a different kind of heart disease, one that affects the smaller blood vessels," she said. Catheterization would not open these small vessels.

Whatever the reason, the study provides evidence to support updated guidelines of the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology, which recommend a conservative strategy for women with acute coronary syndromes, the formal name for heart attacks and unstable angina, the researchers reported.

The researchers won praise from Dr. Nanette Wenger, a professor of medicine at Emory University who was in the group that updated the American Heart Association guidelines, for their efforts at getting the data.

"Often, gender-specific analysis is not done," Wenger said of the earlier reports. "They were able to get from the principal investigators of these trials some data not reported in the papers. This supports precisely what we said in the guidelines."

"This is more evidence that we can't use a one-style-fits-all approach when it comes to treating patients with acute coronary syndrome," said Dr. Sidney C. Smith, director of the University of North Carolina Center for Cardiovascular Science and Medicine, who also helped update the guidelines. "We have to consider risk as well as gender. This is an important study, and it provides support for the new guidelines."

More information

The details of catheterization are explained by the American Heart Association  .

FRIDAY, June 13 (HealthDay News) -- Women who smoke are just as likely to get lung cancer as men who smoke, a large U.S. study found.

But, women who never smoked appear to be at greater risk of lung cancer than men who never smoked, according to the report from the National Cancer Institute (NCI).

"It has been known for a long time that smoking is strongly associated as a cause of lung cancer," said lead researcher Neal Freedman, a cancer prevention fellow at NCI. "But there has been quite a bit of debate about whether the association is similar in men and women."

In the study, the largest of its type, the incidence of lung cancer in men and women who smoked comparable amounts of cigarettes was quite similar, Freedman said. "Before this, there was some evidence that women were more susceptible to carcinogens in cigarette smoking than men," he said.

Freedman's team collected data on 279,214 men and 184,623 women between 50 and 71 years of age from eight states. The data included questions about diet, exercise, alcohol consumption, and whether they were current smokers, ex-smokers or had never smoked.

The researchers found that 1.47 percent of the men and 1.21 percent of the women developed lung cancer. But among women who had never smoked, they were 1.3 times more likely to develop lung cancer than men who never smoked.

For both men and women, those who smoked more than two packs a day were about 50 times more likely to develop lung cancer than people who never smoked.

In terms of the type of lung cancer, people who never smoked were more likely to develop adenocarcinomas, which were more common in women than men. However, the rate of small cell, squamous cell, and undifferentiated tumors was the same for both men and women.

The findings were published online June 14 in the July edition of The Lancet Oncology.

"The most effective way to prevent lung cancer is for men and women not to smoke, or if they are smoking to quit," Freedman said.

Thomas Glynn, the American Cancer Society's senior director of international tobacco control, said the study was very useful, given the debate over the last decade whether women were more susceptible to tobacco-related lung cancers than men.

"The conclusion reached that women are more or less susceptible to lung cancer goes back to the adage, 'Women who smoke like men die like men,' " Glynn said. "This study shows that women who smoked like men get lung cancer like men."

More information

For more on lung cancer, visit the American Lung Association  .