Coronary heart disease: Women's assessment of risk--a qualitative study

Abstract

Coronary heart disease (CHD) kills over 135,000 people each year. The underlying premise of this study was that women might not assess themselves as at risk because CHD has generally been perceived within popular culture, medicine and research as a man's disease. Hayes ( Social Science and Medicine, 35, pp. 55-61, 1991) suggests that critical to the success of any risk assessment strategy is: the identification of risk markers that can accurately predict specific adverse health outcomes and the ability of the strategy users to measure risk factors and calibrate them appropriately. In-depth interviews were conducted with 83 women, 50 who had been admitted to hospital with a CHD-related cardiac event and 33 without manifest CHD. They were found to adopt risk assessment strategies that enabled them to conceptually distance themselves from risk of CHD by: attributing risky lifestyle behaviour to men; subjectively manipulating the potential threat posed by their own risk factors and by over-emphasising the importance of social position to risk. The outcome of these strategies can be summed up as--'women are only at high risk of developing CHD if they adopt a man's way of life'. This has important implications for the prevention of CHD in women.