Aakriti Gupta, an Indian-origin researcher at the Yale School of Medicine, has found that women have longer hospital stays and are more likely than men to die in the hospital after a heart attack.

“Younger women are a vulnerable yet understudied group with worse cardiac risk profiles and worse outcomes after a heart attack as compared with younger men,” Gupta contended.

In the study, Gupta and her team analysed 230,684 hospitalisations for heart attack in patients age 30 to 54 in a national database from 2001 to 2010.

The study found that heart attack hospitalisation rates for patients under age 55 have not declined as quickly as they have for Medicare-age patients, which have seen a 20 percent drop.

Men were more likely to have high cholesterol while women, especially black women, were more likely to also have hypertension, diabetes and heart failure.

“This shows that we need to raise awareness of the importance of controlling cardiovascular risk factors like diabetes, high blood pressure and smoking in younger patients,” Gupta said.

Younger women may benefit from more aggressive control of modifiable cardiovascular risk factors, including early identification and treatment of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, obesity, smoking and diabetes, researchers concluded.

The study was published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.