By
Alan Mozes, HealthDay News
Women are significantly more likely to survive a heart attack if their emergency physician is a woman, new research reveals.
The finding comes from a study of two decades of data on almost
582,000 heart attack patients admitted to hospitals across the state of
Florida between 1991 and 2010.
And the research showed that the gender gap for patients treated by
female physicians was only about 0.2 percent: 11.8 percent of men died,
versus about 12 percent of women. But treatment by male physicians
tripled the gap to 0.7 percent: 12.6 percent of men died compared to
13.3 percent of women.
"There's been a lot of prior work suggesting that women are more
likely to pass during [a heart attack] for a variety of reasons," noted
Brad Greenwood, the study's lead author.
Why that is is not exactly clear, he added.
Prior research suggests that patients generally communicate better
with caregivers of the same gender. That could mean that "female
patients are more comfortable advocating for themselves with a female
physician" or that "male physicians aren't getting all the cues they
need to make the diagnosis" when dealing with female patients, he said.
Another possible factor could be that female heart attack patients
are entering hospitals with gender-specific symptoms that are more
readily recognized by female physicians, Greenwood added. Or that male
doctors are simply less quick to diagnose heart attacks among women
because they think of a heart attack as "a prototypical 'male'
condition."
Greenwood is an associate professor of information and decision
sciences with the Carlson School of Management at the University of
Minnesota-Twin Cities, in Minneapolis.
His team's findings were published online Aug. 6 in the journal PNAS.
During the nearly two-decade study timeframe, roughly 1.3 million
heart attacks occurred among Florida's 20 million residents. Heart
attacks are currently the leading cause of death among both American men
and women across the economic spectrum, and now account for about a
quarter of all fatalities in the United States, the researchers noted.
And because heart attacks come about suddenly, patients are rarely
able to choose their doctor -- or his or her gender -- when entering an
emergency department.
The study did find two factors that seemed to "protect" patients from
a poorer prognosis when treated by a male doctor. For one, survival
rates rose in emergency departments that had a higher overall percentage
of female doctors, even if the attending doctor was male. And
investigators also found that the more experience a male doctor had in
treating female heart attack patients, the better the treatment
outcomes.
Dr. Nieca Goldberg, a spokesperson for the American Heart
Association, noted that a number of factors might be at play. For one
thing, doctors may not be spending the time to realize that men and
women may have different symptoms, and women may have more subtle
symptoms, she said.
Goldberg also said gender affects communication style, "and
communication -- getting the medical history -- is very important in
leading to an accurate diagnosis."
In addition, she suggested, "There may be some unconscious bias, or
that women physicians spend more time with their patients. This needs to
be studied."
Goldberg is director of the NYU Center for Women's Health in New York City.
