by David Cowley

Created on: June 11, 2007

Five hundred thousand American women die each year from heart diseases and the risks increases with age. Heart disease includes the narrowing of the arteries, heart failure, diseases of the heart muscles, inborn defects, hardening of the arties, and other conditions.

We tend to think of men as the ones who commonly have heart diseases but heart diseases is the leading killer of both men and women in the United States. Scientists who are studying the cause of the rise in cardiac problems in woman have identified two factors that appear to be the leading cause of hard disease in woman.

The Change of Life.

After menopause, a woman's body experiences reduced estrogen production, changes in cholesterol levels, changes in the structure of blood vessels, and increased production of the clotting agent fibrinogen. Women who have gone through menopause are two to three times more likely to suffer heart disease than a pre-menopausal woman of the same age. Women that have had a hysterectomy also experience these same raised risk factors. No one yet knows exactly how much a woman's risk is affected by each of these changes, but they are definitely associated with greater heart disease risk.

Scientists studying women and heart disease hypothesized that hormone replacement therapy could help post-menopausal women fight heart disease; however, long-term studies do not confirm that preliminary idea and doctors no longer recommend hormone replacement therapy to battle heart disease.

When talking about your heart disease risk factors with your doctor, get his or her opinion on using hormonal birth control (the pill or the patch). Most doctors believe that using birth control is reasonable safe for women under thirty-five if no other risk factors are involved such as smoking or being overweigh. For women over the age of thirty-file there is not enough evidence that birth control hormones can increase or decrease heart disease in women and more studies are being conducted.

A Change of Lifestyle.

Scientists studying women and heart disease find that women are knowledgeable about what lifestyles are associated with heart disease, and yet they are still prone to maintain those unhealthy lifestyles. For example, according to the National Institutes of Health, fifty-six million American women have high cholesterol, 33% of women have high blood pressure, and 62% of women are overweight. Despite these risks, women are less physically active than men, on average.

The best course of action to

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