Moms may pass heart health risks down to their daughters

Previous studies have shown that both men and women whose parents had suffered from heart attacks or strokes, have greater risks of experiencing one as well.

A recent study that involved 2,210 cases of strokes or heart attacks, shows that difference in sex is a factor to be considered when evaluating the risk of a heart attack. Cases of maternal strokes were found to be more than twice as prevalent as paternal strokes in women with heart attacks. This link, however, wasn’t found in male heart patients. If the mother has a history of stroke, their daughter can be identified as women with high risk of having a heart attack as well.

Dr. Amitave Banarjee, a clinical researcher at the Stroke Prevention Research Unit at the University of Oxford, said that whether genes or the environment  plays a greater factor in the mother-daughter association is hard to determine.

Moreover, results show that over 24 percent of those who had heart attacks, and about the same percentage of those who had strokes, had a history of stroke in at least one of their first-degree relatives. This finding may explain that family history alone is an important factor in stroke and heart attack risk.

According to Dr. Tatjana Rundek of the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, the relation between a maternal stroke to a woman’s risk of heart attack significantly coincides with research that determines the cardiovascular risks in both sexes.