Is there any relationship between menopause and women getting heart disease?
Unless they have some kind of family predisposition, women rarely get heart disease until menopause. And it usually isn’t for five or 10 years after menopause. It’s a post-menopausal disease and unfortunately estrogen does not seem to protect women against heart disease. What are your initial thoughts on the results of the MADIT II study? Over the past 10 years, there have been clear indications that patients who have coronary artery disease who have major damage to their heart are at risk for sudden cardiac death. The first group that was evaluated were the groups who had 1 episode of sudden cardiac arrest and those people were at very high risk for having a second episode. And these people were treated with implantable defibrillators and they did well. They had a better prognosis than those who didn’t [get a defibrillator]. Subsequently, we continued to look at secondary prevention — people who had life-threatening arrhythmias – and they were given defibrillators and the defibrillat
