A new study has discovered that a healthy diet and lifestyle in women are essential to not dying of a heart attack .
Sudden cardiac death (SCD), that is, death within an hour after the symptoms are evident, without any evidence of circulatory collapse, constitutes more than 50 per cent of all cardiac deaths.
In the USA alone there are between 250,000 to 310,000 cases every year.
Over 81,000 women participants were studied in the Nurses’ Health Study from June 1984 to June 2010; they were asked lifestyle questions every two to four years.
The results defined a low-risk SCD lifestyle, that is, not smoking, having a body mass index (BMI) of less than 25, exercising for 30 minutes per day or more, and following a diet like a Mediterranean diet, that is, one which stresses high intake of fruit, veg, legumes, nuts, whole grains, fish and a moderate alcohol intake.
26 years later the follow up highlighted that there had been 321 cases of SCD amongst the women study participants. Women with a BMI of between 21 and 24.9 had the lowest risk of SCD.
Women who were low risk of all four lifestyle factors were 92 per cent less likely to be at risk of SCD on contrast to those who did not adhere to any of the key four-lifestyle factors