ROCHESTER, Minn. — A new Mayo Clinic study finds that many heart attacks in people under 65 — especially women — are caused by factors other than clogged arteries, challenging long-standing assumptions about how heart attacks occur in younger populations.

Study findings published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology examined over 15 years of data from the Rochester Epidemiology Project, providing the most comprehensive population evaluation of heart attack causes in people aged 65 and younger.

More than half of heart attacks in women under age 65 were caused by nontraditional factors, such as spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD, embolism and other conditions unrelated to artery-clogging plaque. Heart attack incidence was significantly lower in women than in me

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