Women Still Get Lower-quality Heart Attack Care than Men

A new study shows that a puzzling gap between the sexes persists in hospital care for heart attack patients, despite specific efforts by hospitals to improve the way they treat all patients immediately after a heart attack.

In all, the study shows, women were less likely than men to benefit from hospitals' quality-improvement measures - and were less likely to get all of the drugs, tests, and counseling about smoking, diet and exercise that have been proven to help heart attack survivors live longer and healthier lives.

The difference may help explain why women in the study were much more likely than men to die within a year of being hospitalized for a heart attack.

The result, published in a recent issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine, comes from an analysis of records from nearly 4,000 heart attack survivors treated at 33 Michigan hospitals before or after a major quality improvement effort took place. All were insured under Medicare.

The researchers, led by a team from the University of Michigan Cardiovascular Center and funded by the American College of Cardiology, found a significant difference between the treatment women received before and after the effort, and that received by men. But the increased use of most medications and other measures was much more pronounced in men.

Overall, both men and women treated in the four months after the quality effort began had a better chance of being alive a year after their hospital stay ended, compared with those treated before the quality-improvement effort. But the drop in death risk was smaller in women.

That difference, say the researchers, is linked to the fact that women patients were less likely than men to have a one-on-one session with doctors or nurses before they went home from the hospital, to help them understand and "take charge" of the medicines and lifestyle changes that could improve their health. Both men and women who had this session, and signed a discharge contract with their doctors and nurses that included a pledge to stick to treatment and follow-up appointments, had a 54 percent lower risk of dying within a year than those who didn't.

"We're troubled by the gender differences we found, though we remain encouraged by the overall effect of post-heart attack quality improvement efforts," says senior author Kim Eagle, M.D., co-director of the U-M Cardiovascular Center and the Hewlett Professor of Medicine at the U-M Medical School. Eagle co-directs the Guidelines Applied in Practice (GAP) Project in Michigan, the ACC program under which the study was performed.

While the reasons behind the persistent differences are unclear, Eagle and his colleagues speculate that it may have something to do with the fact that women heart attack patients tend to be older, and as a result doctors may not feel that women patients can derive as much benefit from post-heart attack treatments and lifestyle changes.