Cardiovascular disease in Indigenous women
In 2012–13, an estimated 12,500 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women had 1 or more heart, stroke and vascular diseases. Of these, 7,100 had coronary heart disease.
After adjusting for age, Indigenous women (6.9%) were almost twice as likely as non-Indigenous women (3.8%) to have CVD.
Absolute CVD risk was high among Indigenous women, with 23% aged 35–74 at high absolute risk of a future CVD event (Calabria et al. 2018).
In 2011, CVD was the third leading cause of burden of disease in Indigenous women—accounting for 11% of the total burden (AIHW 2016). The burden of disease from CVD for Indigenous women was 3.2 times as high as the burden for non-Indigenous women. CVD accounted for nearly one-fifth (18%) of the total gap in disease burden between Indigenous and non-Indigenous women.
In 2015–16, there were about 6,500 CVD hospitalisations for Indigenous women (1,174 per 100,000 population). Hospitalisation rates for different forms of CVD among Indigenous women were up to 4 times as high as among non-Indigenous women.
Between 2014 and 2016, CVD was responsible for 867 deaths among Indigenous women (42 per 100,000 population). Indigenous women were up to twice as likely as non-Indigenous women to die from CVD, coronary heart disease, or stroke (Figure 7).
Figure 7: Cardiovascular disease deaths among women, by Indigenous status, 2014–2016
Source: AIHW National Mortality Database.