Men get better care for heart attacks

WOMEN who suffer heart attacks are more than twice as likely to die in hospital than men because the condition is seen as a male problem, experts have said.

More than 8,200 women in England and Wales could have survived their heart attacks had they simply been given the same quality of treatment as men, new research has found.

Researchers at the University of Leeds said the actual number of lives lost to unequal care is likely to be much higher, as they did not include all hospital admissions that occurred over the 10-year study period.

It saw them use anonymised data from the UK’S national heart attack registry, the Myocardial Ischaemia National Audit Project (MINAP), to analyse the treatment and outcomes of 691,290 people who were hospitalised for heart attacks in England and Wales between 2003 and 2013.

In the study, women tended to be older when admitted and more likely to have illnesses such as diabetes and high blood pressure.

But even after adjusting for ages and greater risk factors, the team found that women had more than double the median rate of death in the 30 days after their heart attack than men (5.2 per cent versus 2.3 per cent).

Researchers suggested this may be, in part, explained by women being less likely to receive the guideline recommended care.