Healthline.com

According to a new consensus document from European cardiologists, gynecologists, and endocrinologists, doctors should make much stronger efforts to detect high blood pressure in middle-aged women.

The study authors said that high blood pressure in women is often written off as either stress or menopausal symptoms, both by their doctors and by the women themselves.

When the diagnosis is overlooked, however, it can cause women to delay treatment, putting them at greater risk for conditions like heart failure and stroke.

Better recognition of high blood pressure is an important step to reducing women’s cardiovascular risk.

Why Does Hypertension in Middle-Aged Women Get Overlooked?

Dr. Angela H.E.M. Maas, who was the lead author of the document, said that high blood pressure is taken more seriously in men and less well treated in women.

She said this is because we consider elevated blood pressure in women often as “stress,” and in men as “hypertension.”

“This is partly because of bias by doctors, but also by women themselves,” Maas said. “Women often explain an elevated blood pressure as stress-related and are not always open to the hypertension diagnosis and treatment.”

Maas said it can often take more time to convince women and to start and continue medical treatment.

“The timing of onset of hypertension is often at the start of menopause and this leads to overlapping symptoms that are not always properly adjudicated,” she said.

In the past, women were considered less likely than men to have heart disease, according to Dr. Maan Malahfji, a cardiologist with Houston Methodist DeBakey Cardiology Associates, who was not associated with the consensus report.