Impact of Gender on Myocardial Infarction Burden and Post-Myocardial Infarction Remodeling

Introduction: Prior studies have shown women to have worse clinical outcomes after acute myocardial infarction (MI) compared to men. The impact of gender on MI size and post-MI cardiac remodeling is not well studied. Methods: The population comprised patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) and clinical history of MI prospectively enrolled in cardiac magnetic resonance (CMR) research protocols. Cine-CMR was used to quantify left ventricular (LV) chamber size, ejection fraction, and mass. Delayed enhancement CMR was used to measure MI, for which size was quantified as % LV myocardium. Results: 292 patients were studied, among whom 47 (16%) were women. Women tended to be older and have lower BSA (both pu003c0.05) but were otherwise similar with respect to traditional cardiac risk factors including hypertension, and prior MI (p=NS for all). Despite similarities in baseline traditional risk profile and time to revascularization (11 vs. 9 hours; p=0.3), total infarct size was ~1.5 fold higher among men (14.8 ± ...