(Adnkronos) - “L’infarto del miocardio nell’uomo si manifesta classicamente con il dolore al braccio sinistro, mentre nella donna i sintomi sono spesso molto più sfumati, come dolore intestinale, nausea e grande stanchezza. Molto spesso, una donna che si reca al pronto soccorso con questi disturbi molto forti, viene ricoverata nel reparto di gastroenterologia e questo chiaramente si tradurrà in un ritardo nella diagnosi, in un ritardo nella terapia e, quindi, una mortalità più elevata”. Parole di Elena Ortona, direttrice del centro di medicina di genere dell’Iss e componente scientifica dell’Osservatorio sulla Medicina di genere, all’evento ‘Le donne verso un cuore consapevole’ ideato e promosso da Daiichi Sankyo Italia per parlare dei fattori di rischio cardiovascolare specifici per le donne, delle strategie preventive, del legame tra cuore e psiche e del ruolo dell’innovazione digitale in sanità a supporto del paziente.
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00:00Cardiovascular diseases have always been considered as exclusive men's diseases, but in reality
00:10they are the main cause of death for women.
00:13Even 46% of the deaths in women's lupus are due to cardiovascular causes, against 38%
00:22in men.
00:23So, women are highly involved in this, and what is the cause of such a high mortality rate?
00:31Probably, it is also an underestimation by women, but also by doctors, of the symptoms
00:38that are linked to these diseases.
00:41Just think of the classic example of myocardial infarction, which is classically manifested
00:47in men, with pain in the left arm, while in women the symptoms are often much more
00:53blurred, they are intestinal pain, nausea, great tiredness, and very often a woman
00:58finds herself going to the emergency room with these very severe disorders and is recovered
01:03in a gastroenterology department, and this clearly translates into a delay in
01:08diagnosis, a delay in therapy, and therefore a higher mortality rate.
01:13Therefore, it is absolutely necessary to train, to update the health personnel to make
01:21the health personnel aware of the differences, also in terms of clinical manifestations,
01:27the symptomatology of these diseases in men and women, but it is also very important
01:32a communication, a dissemination to the population, so that everyone can be aware,
01:38everyone must be aware of their health needs, also due to the peculiarities of
01:44sex and gender, and certainly also in terms of drugs, these differences are very important,
01:50we know that drugs have normally been tested, they have been analyzed on a male body,
01:56even when women are enrolled, then the data is not analyzed, the results are not
02:03disaggregated by sex, and therefore the differences are not highlighted,
02:07neither in terms of tolerability, nor in terms of the effectiveness of the drug.
02:12Therefore, all these things must be analyzed, all these aspects must be included,
02:17it must be considered that medicine for men and medicine for women are separate,
02:22they are different, they must be considered both in order to achieve equity and
02:27the ownership of the cures in a truly effective way.
02:30In Italy there was a law, the law 3 of 2018, which was a bit, it makes us a little bit
02:37the first of the class, also in Europe, because we have this law in which Article 3
02:44ensures the consideration of a certain gender in clinical trials, in research,
02:50in training, in communication, but despite this, we still have to make a big effort,
02:56we also have to make big investments, because all these laws are anyway at zero cost,
03:02and without money, without the possibility of investing, it is clearly very difficult to reach
03:08even the experiments that are balanced for men and for women, because clearly
03:13to achieve statistical significance you have to double the numbers.
03:18So on the one hand it would seem a much greater expense, at least initially,
03:22even if then the savings are evident, because we consider that many drugs that have been
03:27removed from the market, have been removed from the market precisely because they gave
03:31significant adverse effects in the female sex.