Now It's Iron

DR. JEROME SULLIVAN TOLD YOU SO. MORE THAN A decade ago, the South Carolina medical researcher came up with a theory explaining why young women rarely have heart attacks. It isn't that they are protected by the hormone estrogen, as conventional wisdom had it, said Sullivan, but that they lose iron every month during menstrual bleeding. And iron, he believed, promotes heart attacks. Now a study from Finland, published in the American Heart Association journal Circulation, has provided strong evidence that he was right.

Nearly 2,000 Finnish men between the ages of 42 and 60, with no obvious evidence of heart...