The world agreed on one heart attack definition to help women

The world's four leading cardiovascular organizations agreed on a single universal definition of a heart attack for the first time, and two of the changes matter most for women. The announcement came at the European Society of Cardiology congress in Munich, with the guidelines published in the European Heart Journal. Emergency departments will now use sex-specific thresholds on the troponin blood test, the main diagnostic tool worldwide, which had been set to one level that catches all men having a heart attack but misses some women. Three heart attack types up to ten times more common in women, including spontaneous coronary artery dissection, were upgraded to the same priority tier as the clot-caused kind most people picture. Prof. Nicholas Mills of the University of Edinburgh, who led the task force, called the old threshold an "unintended systematic bias against women." Getting four organizations onto one document, he noted, was its own challenge.