Amy Sarma, MD, talks cardiovascular disease and menopause associations at ACC 2026

At the American College of Cardiology 75th Annual Scientific Session & Expo, held in New Orleans, Louisiana, from March 28-30, 2026, experts gathered to discuss the evolving landscape of cardiology, including how it impacts sex-specific cardiovascular risk.

In this interview, courtesy of our sister publication, HCP Live, Amy Sarma, MD, Cardiologist, Cathy E. Minehan Endowed Chair in Cardiology; Director, Women's Heart Health Program, Massachusetts General Hospital; Co-Director, Cardiovascular Disease and Pregnancy Program, Massachusetts General Hospital, sat down to discuss the necessity of a life-course view of heart disease in women.

Sarma highlights the menopause transition as a critical clinical opportunity for cardiometabolic risk optimization and addresses the urgent need to close the research gap regarding unique physiological differences between the sexes.

Contemporary OB/GYN:

What advancements in technology and medicine have been made and addressed at this year’s meeting related to women’s cardiovascular disease?

Amy Sarma, MD:

Absolutely. Highlighting again the themes of our session, what we have increasingly discovered is, first, that women are not just "little men." We have unique, sex-specific risk factors and differences in our cardiovascular risk, and even in the types of cardiovascular conditions for which there is a greater susceptibility—particularly in women as compared with men.

Furthermore, risk factors are not static throughout the lifetime. Within the reproductive life course of women, these risk factors and the types of diseases to which women are more susceptible than men change. That is why we really need to have a life-course view of cardiovascular disease in women, in addition to thinking about a sex-specific view. These are the topics that we will be investigating today.

It is exciting that the ACC is increasingly covering topics that highlight these sex-specific differences. There is also a lot of excitement in this space now that there hasn't necessarily been in the past, particularly thinking about the space of menopause as a unique life transition for women in which there is an opportunity for risk optimization.

Contemporary OB/GYN:

Can you touch on the associations of menopause and cardiovascular disease?

Amy Sarma, MD:

We see that there is a significant transition around the time of menopause, where many cardiometabolic risk factors start to increase during the menopause transition period. That transition period and those risk factors can then lead to increased risk for cardiovascular disease among older women in particular. It is an opportunity around that transition period to think about how we can better help women optimize risk factors.

For example, we know that when women present with atherosclerotic acute coronary syndromes, they often have a greater burden of cardiometabolic risk factors at that period of time. We should think about that transition as an opportunity to optimize even the traditional risk factors that we know affect both men and women, while also thinking about where there are unique opportunities to address sex-specific differences in risk. I think that is still an understudied area, and I am hoping that as there is increased excitement about addressing this important clinical gap, the research will robustly follow as well.

Editor’s note: AI assisted with transcript edits.