Gender-specific prescription for cardiovascular diseases?

This editorial refers to ‘Female-specific aspects in the pharmacotherapy of chronic cardiovascular diseases’† by N. Jochmann et al., on page 1585 The interest of the scientific and medical community on the impact of cardiovascular diseases in women has significantly grown in the last few years. Cardiovascular disease is indeed the leading cause of death among both women and men, even if this unequivocal epidemiological observation had not been taken into the right consideration in the past. Although cardiovascular diseases are equally important in men and women, gender differences in the clinical manifestation and progression of the disease have been demonstrated. The understanding of these differences is of crucial importance for the improvement of the clinical management of cardiovascular diseases and for the development of possible new gender-specific diagnostic and therapeutic options. Women, for many years, have been underrepresented in randomized clinical trials and only recently there has been a significant increase in the number and proportion of women who participate in these studies. Accordingly, the possibility of different responses to pharmacological therapy in women and in men has recently emerged as part of the gender-related issues of cardiovascular disease. The review by Jochmann et al.1 addresses the gender differences in pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and physiology which may contribute to a different response to cardiovascular drugs in women when compared with men. The authors analysed several clinical trials of cardiovascular drugs which involved a significant proportion of women as well as the studies which specifically addressed the issue of gender differences in pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics of agents utilized for prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease.