"Women don't have a lowered risk of heart disease, they have a delayed risk of heart disease," she says. "So their risk is going to come 10 years later and that has got to do with the menopausal hormones - once the ovarian hormones decrease, your blood pressure is going to start to increase, the ratio of your good cholesterol to bad cholesterol tends to change and women tend to put on more weight around the menopause." "Diabetes is a much more powerful risk factor for heart disease in women than it is in men. Diabetes will increase a woman's risk of heart disease three to seven fold but it will only increase a man's risk two to three fold," she says. "And before menopause, it will negate the protective effect of oestrogen in pre-menopausal women." "If we take platelets from a man and platelets from a woman and we study them in the test tube they behave very differently. We can't attribute it all to hormone effects, there's some intrinsic difference. We have chased that and we still don't understand it."For more information on heart health, see www.irishheart.ie...

A woman's heart