Why Sex Matters in Takotsubo Syndrome

The aim of this study was to describe the prevalence of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy (TTC), age-gender interaction, and various comorbidities associated with it based on nationwide hospitalization records. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is an increasingly reported clinical syndrome; however, there are no data on its prevalence in the general US population. The Nationwide Inpatient Sample discharge records were queried for the year 2008 using the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, code 429.83. There were 6,837 patients diagnosed with TTC among 33,506,402 hospitalizations in the Nationwide Inpatient Sample database. Women were found to have higher odds of developing TTC (odds ratio 8.8). Women >55 years old had 4.8 times higher odds for developing TTC when compared with women <55 years old. Smoking, alcohol abuse, anxiety states, and hyperlipidemia were commonly associated with TTC. The peak incidence of hospitalization for TTC was in summer. Takotsubo cardiomyopathy was diagnosed in about 0.02% of all hospitalizations in the United States, mostly in elderly women with history of smoking, alcohol abuse, anxiety states, and hyperlipidemia. Copyright © 2012 Mosby, Inc. All rights reserved.

Muscle sympathetic nerve activity (MSNA) was measured directly along with blood pressure at rest in 69 healthy women (20-79 yr old) and 76 age-matched healthy men (16-80 yr old). All were nonobese and normotensive. In the women and men the MSNA was positively correlated with age (women: y = 0.788x - 5.418, r = 0.846, P /=60 yr old (P = 0.1739, NS). The results suggest that MSNA increases with age in women and men and that the activity is markedly lower in young women than in men but is markedly accelerated with age.