Study Finds Gender Gap in Cardiac Arrest Care and Outcomes

 

 Dr. Luke Kim

Women treated at a hospital after cardiac arrest are less likely than men to receive potentially life-saving procedures like angioplasty or angiography, according to new research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

While those procedures have helped boost cardiac arrest survival rates overall, hospital death rates remained higher for women than men, the study found.

Women were 25 percent less likely to receive an angiography, which looks for blocked coronary arteries, and 29 percent to have an angioplasty or percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), which open up the arteries, according to the research. Women were also 19 percent less likely to be treated with therapeutic hypothermia, which lowers the body temperature to help improve the odds of survival and reduce the risk of brain damage.

“The troublesome part ... is that, just as with many other treatments, we’re still not doing as good a job with women as men. Women tend to get less immediate care when time is essential,” said the study's lead author Dr. Luke Kim, whose 10-year study was featured on Healio, a news site for health care specialists. Dr. Kim is also an assistant professor of medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The study was the first to report sex-based disparities across a representative spectrum of cardiac arrest patients from more than 1,000 U.S. hospitals around the country, according to a press release.