Low income women at greater risk of heart disease: Study
London, Jan 19 (IANS) Women from low socio-economic backgrounds are 25 per cent more likely to suffer a heart attack than disadvantaged men, research shows.
Cardiovascular disease is the single leading cause of death in women worldwide, with an estimated 8.6 million women dying every year.
The findings showed that a lower socioeconomic status, compared to a higher, is associated with a higher risk of cardiovascular disease for both sexes, but women from more disadvantaged backgrounds were relatively more likely to suffer from coronary heart disease than similarly affected men.
However, the study found no difference found for stroke.
“Our study has shown there is a significant difference between the sexes – more disadvantaged women are suffering from heart disease than their male counterparts, which is concerning,” said Sanne Peters, research student at The George Institute for Global Health, in Britain.
Further, men and women have a similar lifetime risk of heart disease. However, women, on average, develop heart disease 5-10 years later in life than men. This advantage is smaller among women with a lower socioeconomic status.
For the study, the team examined data from 22 million people from North America, Europe, Asia and Australasia.
The results demonstrated a need for tailored interventions for women to address the gender gap and deliver the best possible care.
“There is a clear need for sex specific research to discover why disproportionally more women than men are suffering from heart disease in disadvantaged communities and to deliver prevention and treatment programs that will reduce the burden of cardiovascular disease around the world,” Peters said.
The study was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Heartbeat to soon unlock electronic health records
New York, Jan 19 (IANS) What if your heartbeat can safeguard your electronic health records in the near future? Researchers from Binghamton University believe so and have used the heart’s electrical pattern as an encryption key for electronic records.
The cost and complexity of traditional encryption solutions prevent them being directly applied to telemedicine or mobile healthcare.
“Those systems are gradually replacing clinic-centered healthcare, and we wanted to find a unique solution to protect sensitive personal health data with something simple, available and cost-effective,” said Zhanpeng Jin, assistant professor in the department of electrical and computer engineering.
Binghamton researchers encrypted patient data using a person’s unique electrocardiograph (ECG) as the key to lock and unlock the files.
“The ECG signal is one of the most important and common physiological parameters collected and analysed to understand a patient’s’ health,” said Jin.
“While ECG signals are collected for clinical diagnosis and transmitted through networks to electronic health records, we strategically reused the ECG signals for the data encryption,” Jin added.
The identification scheme is a combination of previous work by Jin using a person’s unique brainprint instead of traditional passwords for access to computers and buildings combined with cyber-security work.
“This research will be very helpful and significant for next-generation secure, personalised healthcare,” Jin noted.
Since an ECG may change due to age, illness or injury, researchers are currently working out ways to incorporate those variables.
Through this strategy, the security and privacy can be enhanced while minimum cost will be added, the researchers told the gathering at the IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM 2016) in Washington, DC, recently.
