Women more likely to die of heart attack if doctor is male

TAMPA: Women suffering heart attacks in hospital emergency rooms in the United States are more likely to die if their doctor is a man than a woman, warned a study on Monday.

The study was based on more than 500,000 patients admitted to hospital emergency departments for acute myocardial infarction — a medical term for heart attack — in Florida between 1991 and 2010.

Researchers at Harvard University found a “stark” difference in survival according to whether the patient’s and doctor’s gender matched. Namely, when women were treated by female doctors, “there was a significant and positive effect” on survival, said the study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Almost 12 per cent of patients die when rushed for emergency treatment for a heart attack.

Matching female doctors to female patients “reduced the probability of death by 5.4 per cent, relative to this baseline”, it said.

By another way of looking at the data, “female patients treated by male physicians were 1.52 per cent less likely to survive than male patients treated by female physicians”.

This study offered a new explanation for why gender inequality in heart attack mortality persists. Researchers also found that the more women a male doctor treated in his life, the less likely his female patients were to die.

However, this presented a “catch-22” because it suggested that women must die so the doctor could learn from his mistakes. The solution might be simply to add more female doctors in emergency departments, the researchers argued.