When female patients miss a beat, doctors shouldn t

Physicians should more closely follow those female patients in whom they detect an irregular heart rhythm, findings from the 15-year Women’s Health Study suggest. The study, which followed more than 34,000 healthy, middle-aged women, was published Tuesday in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Its findings are that women with an irregular heart rhythm, called atrial fibrillation (AF), are at much greater risk of premature death over the 15-year period after the irregularity is detected. Doctors should thus look for other manifestations of, and risk factors for, cardiovascular disease, and aggressively treat them when found. Further, they should prescribe anti-coagulant therapy to prevent embolic complications of AF, especially stroke.